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.
In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.
The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.
If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.
When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns – in short, being fooled by randomness.
The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much.
I’ve debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.
Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum.