Quote

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Learning
Slightest
Feeling
Improving
Feelings
Civilized
Without
Guilt
Nothing
Period
Long
Periods
Spend
Amount

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Image
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
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
Image
It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
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
Image
We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Image
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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb