Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.”

“Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.”

“I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.”

“If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.”

“I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.”

“I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.”

“Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.”

“The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.”

“Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.”

“Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.”