Nassim Nicholas Taleb People Quotations

The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.

Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.

For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.

The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what they were doing.

Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.

People employed in financial institutions are rarely interesting and even more rarely likable.

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.

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress.

I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.

My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: I don't know....

We should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible.

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses.

I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.

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.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

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.

People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays, and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.

People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.

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

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.