Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“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.”

“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.”

“I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.”

“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.”

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.”

“I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.”

“My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal”

“When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.”

“A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.”

“The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.”

“Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.”

“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.”

“When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.”

“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.”

“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative “low risk” game.”

“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.”

“Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.”

“I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.”

“The American people will eventually get hurt by this accumulated deficit. That's the problem. We have too much deficit. We have to find a solution.”

“I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that.”