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" All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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" 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. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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

" Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I have never had personal debt and never will. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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

" What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb