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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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" When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters. "

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" 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. "

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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 have never had personal debt and never will. "

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

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

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" The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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" I'm a private intellectual, not a public one. "

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" 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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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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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" The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it. "

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" 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. "

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" What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society. "

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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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" 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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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