Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

About Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, and risk analyst, whose work focuses on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by the Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.
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Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

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 t...

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

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 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

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

I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

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

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I have never had personal debt and never will.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Author Bio

  • NameNassim Nicholas Taleb
  • DescriptionAuthor, philosopher, statistician, trader
  • BornJanuary 1, 1960
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Essayist; Mathematician; Writer