Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[I]t is about distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price for your mistakes. ...If you give an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences.

[N]ever engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.

In case you are giving economic views: Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio.

I suppose that the main benefit of being rich (over just being independent) is to be able to despise rich people (a good concentration of whom you find in glitzy ski resorts) without any sour grapes. It is even sweeter when these farts don't know that you are richer than they are.

Our greatest asset is the one we distrust the most: the built-in antifragility of certain risk-taking systems.

It is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us—and, sadly, not them ... For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits.

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

We didn't get where we are thanks to the sissy notion of resilience.

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.