Quote collection
342 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits."
"Bankers, they're not harmed by their mistakes. They benefit when things go right, and the society pays the price."
"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."
"Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish."
"Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards."
"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."
"Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse."
"The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one."
"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."
"The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one."
"It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite."
"Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet."
"We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract."
"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."
"Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control)."
"Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense."
"I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries."
"Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic."
"The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be."
"What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society."