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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.

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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More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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You get pseudo-order when you seek order you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.
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The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them nerdiness the reverse
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He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
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Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
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Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
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I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill.
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The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this nerdification, to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.
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Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.
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For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.
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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.
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Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.
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As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.
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Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
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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.
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I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.
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Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.
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The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.
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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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When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
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