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Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 11
Author
Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
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Owners
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Library
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Valuable
Large
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Personal
Unread
Books
Eco
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More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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It's harder to say 'no' when you really mean it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible we scorn the abstract.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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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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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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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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Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb