Nassim Nicholas Taleb Men Quotations

Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have—or don’t have—in their portfolio.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.

A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

Weak men act to satisfy their needs, stronger men their duties.

What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment.

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death

My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.

A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.