Quote collection
342 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger."
"[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have."
"My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal"
"Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive."
"My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain."
"If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything."
"Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness."
"Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum"
"Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave."
"true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing"
"Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness."
"A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don't know where the risks are."
"It's harder to say 'no' when you really mean it."
"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."
"Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things."
"It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear."
"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."
"In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term."
"It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own."
"For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight."