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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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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" The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

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" The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

" 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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

" Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China. "

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

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" Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb