Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
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.
If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.
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.
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.
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
The key to wealth is that it doesn't matter. Once you've had it, you don't think anything of it; you can wear cheap watches.
Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
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.
If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.
Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.
I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.
I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.
The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.
I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.
Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.
The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
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 world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.
I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.
Paul Krugman is a danger to society!
I have never had personal debt and never will.
We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.
When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.
For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.
I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.
Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
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.
The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what they were doing.
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.
I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.
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.
I am happy everywhere except in places where I see glitz and rich farts. I am happiest in Brooklyn, where the concentration of rich farts is minimal.
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
