“ Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, it will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Simply, they viol… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Who gets rewarded, the central banker who avoids a recession or the one who comes to correct his predecessors’ faults and happens to be there during some economic recovery? Who is more valuable, the p… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ While we have a highly unstable memory, a diary provides indelible facts recorded more or less immediately; it thus allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock—in other words, if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of rand… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ When the person is highly intelligent, he can astonish you with the most far-fetched, yet completely plausible interpretations of the most innocuous remark. If Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredicta… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ What he likes most about proprietary trading is that it requires considerably less time than other high-paying professions; in other words it is perfectly compatible with his non-middle-class work eth… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We react to a piece of information not on its logical merit, but on the basis of which framework surrounds it, and how it registers with our social-emotional system. Logical Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We have the illusion that the world functions thanks to programmed design, university research, and bureaucratic funding, but there is compelling—very compelling—evidence to show that this is an illus… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We have been unconsciously exploiting antifragility in practical life and, consciously, rejecting it—particularly in intellectual life. The Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some exte… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We do not need to be rational and scientific when it comes to the details of our daily life—only in those that can harm us and threaten our survival. Modern life seems to invite us to do the exact opp… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We can, however, assess regularities by running precise and thorough experiments on how people react under certain conditions, and keep a tally of what we see. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Veteran trader Marty O’Connell calls this the firehouse effect. He had observed that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impart… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many p… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy....and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen.The contagio… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Transportation didn’t get safer just because people learn from errors, but because the system does. The experience of the system is different from that of individuals; it is grounded in filtering. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
