“ I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not t… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth—there was a match to my curiosity. And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I believe that the principal asset I need to protect and cultivate is my deep-seated intellectual insecurity. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work—better to be loved by a doz… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Hume came to warn us against such knowledge, and to stress the need for some rigor in the gathering and interpretation of knowledge Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ His idea is that if we were to optimize at every step in life, then it would cost us an infinite amount of time and energy. Accordingly, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. Patrocles does not strike us as a hero because of his accomplishments (he was rapidly killed) but because he prefer… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has ne… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Further, in countries where wealth comes from rent-seeking, political patronage, or regulatory capture (which, I remind the reader, is how the powerful and the insiders use regulation to scam the publ… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point). Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ For more than a millennium the eastern Mediterranean seaboard called Syria Libanensis, or Mount Lebanon, had been able to accommodate at least a dozen different sects, ethnicities, and beliefs—it work… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ For instance, few realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don’t talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department. The same with a… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history books are written by academics; we will have to refine historical interpretations of growth, innovation, and many such things. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
