The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.
We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.
For many people, commuting is the worst part of the day, and policies that can make commuting shorter and more convenient would be a straightforward way to reduce minor but widespread suffering.
Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
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.
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.
The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.
I don't go to the doctor except when I'm very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water.
People employed in financial institutions are rarely interesting and even more rarely likable.
Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer.
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.
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.
Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
Paul Krugman is a danger to society!
A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.
What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.
The mortgage crisis is a clear instance of consumers who needed protection. There was predatory lending to people who didn't know what they were doing.
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.
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.
You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
Inequalities of wealth lead to a dispersion in wealth for all.
Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
I have never had personal debt and never will.
In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.
The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.
Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.
Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.
The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.
What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.
Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.
Democracies can't handle austerity measures very well.
Governments that try to shoot for a surplus hardly ever reach it.
Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.
It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
Capitalism has forced everyone to overoptimize in order to compete.
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.
If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.
All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.
