It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag , a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation. Nassim Nicholas Taleb More Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb More Quotes From Nassim Nicholas Taleb Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand. Nassim Nicholas Taleb certainsocialmean 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. Nassim Nicholas Taleb arrogancegreekideas Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control). Nassim Nicholas Taleb anxietycitizensuse Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense. Nassim Nicholas Taleb common-senseexcusecommon Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards. Nassim Nicholas Taleb fragilityriskpeople Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse. Nassim Nicholas Taleb realismskepticism Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb academiasurfaceenough Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb harmmistakepeople We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Nassim Nicholas Taleb embeddedtangiblefavors Ideas come and go, stories stay. Nassim Nicholas Taleb black-swanstoriesideas What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society. Nassim Nicholas Taleb financialcommunityneeds He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. Nassim Nicholas Taleb But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time. Nassim Nicholas Taleb worstcasesevents Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb richbecomingneeds I'm a private intellectual, not a public one. Nassim Nicholas Taleb intellectual You never win an argument until they attack your person. Nassim Nicholas Taleb argumentpersonswinning It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time. Nassim Nicholas Taleb paybackdestinyrisk Switzerland is the perfect place where you have volatility at a municipal level that nothing up top - small units competing with each other. Nassim Nicholas Taleb switzerlandlevelsperfect Bankers, they're not harmed by their mistakes. They benefit when things go right, and the society pays the price. Nassim Nicholas Taleb pay-the-pricemistakebankers I'd rather have the market tell us what - I'd rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington. Nassim Nicholas Taleb passiveeventspeople
