Quote collection
342 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?"
"The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder."
"Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it."
"Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something."
"Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually ."
"We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts."
"It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation."
"When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself."
"I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man."
"Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to."
"I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill."
"The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement."
"The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country."
"Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity."
"We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience."
"Read books are far less valuable than unread ones."
"In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice."
"Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment."
"Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea."
"Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood."