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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. "

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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" Paul Krugman is a danger to society! "

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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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" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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 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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

" A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation. "

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