“ Nicocles, as early as the fourth century B.C., asserts that doctors claimed responsibility for success and blamed failure on nature, or on some external cause. The Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact - and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ My dream—the solution—is that we would have a National Entrepreneur Day, with the following message: Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Mother Nature is not perfect, but has so far proven smarter than humans, certainly much smarter than biologists. So my approach is to combine evidence-based research (stripped of biological theory), w… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop’s fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Mother Nature did not attend high school geometry courses or read the books of Euclid of Alexandria. Her geometry is jagged, but with a logic of its own and one that is easy to understand. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Most of the debate between creationists and evolutionary theorists (of which I do not partake) lies in the following: creationists believe that the world comes from some form of design while evolution… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Modernity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Mediocristan is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted; Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, t… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity, Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, and Paul Ormerod’s Why Most Things Fail. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Let me simplify my take on intervention. To me it is mostly about having a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone. And we may need to intervene to control t… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much -- but if you do, do not make big scientif… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researche… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It is often said that is wise he who can see things coming. Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding stat… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
