Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Quotes about people

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst. Explore interesting quotes on people.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: 392 quotes29 likes

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 30

“People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p.15

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Learning to Expect the Unexpected," The New York Times (2004-04-08}

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 174

“One cannot assert authority by accepting one's own fallibility. Simply, people need to be blinded by knowledge - we are made to follow leaders who can gather people together because the advantages of being in groups trump the disadvantages of being alone. It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 192

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. xxi

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 24

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 19

“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.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 176 (footnote)

“Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 128

“The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d5aa24e-23a4-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1, Financial Times, 2009-04-07. <br class="br">Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world (2009)

“Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

“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….”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Home Page http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

“People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Skin in the Game

Source: Skin in the Game (2018), p. 162