An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.
Things always become obvious after the fact.
A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point.
My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.
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.’
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.
My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.
People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.
If you let markets – in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they’ll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.
As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they’re obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.
It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, ‘Oh, its temporary.’ It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That’s how they work.
Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don’t confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.