Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.
Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have – or don’t have – in their portfolio.
Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.
At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.
In the United States large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation’s funeral at our expense.
I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.
The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
Never trust a journalist unless she’s your mother.
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.
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.
Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.
The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely.”
People who forecast simply because “that’s my job,” knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call ethical. What they do is no different from repeating lies simply because “it’s my job.”
Rationalism crashes in the tails.
The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.
You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.