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You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 11
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Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
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More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.
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Ideas come and go, stories stay.
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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.
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Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.
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Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.
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I always remind myself that what one observes is at best a combination of variance and returns, not just returns.
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If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.
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I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.
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You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave you also need to avoid becoming a master.
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The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18.
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The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
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People focus on role models it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up
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It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem to this day I avoid the label Lebanese, preferring the less restrictive Levantine designation.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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They are born, put in a box they go home to live in a box they study by ticking boxes they go to what is called work in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box they talk about thinking outside the box and when they die they are put in a box.
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Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
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When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.
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But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.
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A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb