Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

“A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a 'solution' and creates a problem.”

“A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.”

“A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.”

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.”

“Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.”

“An idea stats to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.”

“By all means, avoid words — threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!”

“Contra the prevailing belief, 'success' isn't being on top of a hierarchy, it is standing outside all hierarchies.”

“Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.”

“English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).”

“Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.”

“I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life.

Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel.

If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.”

“I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent.

Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.”

“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”

“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.”

“In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”

“In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.”

“It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.”

“Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators.”

“Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.”

“Love without sacrifice is like theft.”

“Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone.”

“Men destroy each other during war, themselves during peacetime.”

“Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.”

“My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.”

“My classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism.

Many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects – the fragility criterion.

I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse.”

“Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.”

“Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of 'rational' models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative.”

“Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.”

“Sometimes people ask you a question with their eyes begging you to not tell them the truth.”