Nassim Nicholas Taleb

People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.

Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog.

If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

What we saw worldwide from 2014 to 2018, from India to the U.K. to the U.S., was a rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy League, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think, and… 5) whom to vote for.

Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort.

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.

There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)—likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ...

It is all about redundancy. Nature likes to overinsure itself.

I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility.