"You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness."
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Quote collection
Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes (page 4 of 18)
342 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain."
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"If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'"
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"To bankrupt a fool, give him information."
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"You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity."
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"The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference"
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"The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist"
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"Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that."
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"The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich."
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"The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself."
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"Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever."
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"There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved."
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"You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system."
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"Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile"
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"Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost."
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"If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry."
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"You find peace by coming to terms with what you don't know."
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"A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty."
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"Remember that you are a Black Swan."
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"The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death."
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