Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.

Things always become obvious after the fact

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.

true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation’s funeral at our expense.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

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.

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.

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.

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative.

An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination.

Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

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