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" I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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" 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. "

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" For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

" 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 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 a private intellectual, not a public one. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

" 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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to. "

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries. "

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb