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" Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well. "

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" What we do today has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. It is a crony type of system that transfers money to the coffers of bureaucrats. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom. "

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

" 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

" If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing. "

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

" 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

" 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

" A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers. "

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

" We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price. "

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