Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Related Quotes:

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

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

" Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain. "

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

" It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal. "

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis. "

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

" 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. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine. "

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

" Being an economist is the least ethical profession, closer to charlatanism than any science. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Paul Krugman is a danger to society! "

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb