"I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can't have capitalism without punishment."
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Quote collection
Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes (page 13 of 18)
342 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi."
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"Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile."
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"The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents."
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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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"What kills me makes others stronger."
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"It's not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously."
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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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"If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you."
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"It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one."
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"It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits."
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"The bonus for bankers fragilizes the system. Someone has the upside at the expense of others."
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"Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant."
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"In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation’s funeral at our expense."
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"We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price."
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"I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse."
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"I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are."
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"It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time."
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"If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!"
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"Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry."
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