Nassim Nicholas Taleb

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

To become a philosopher, start by walking very slowly.

The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.

It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

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.

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

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.

Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.

The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.

Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.

When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.

Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.

Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.

You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.