"Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Just as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds" - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"In a thick and captivating book, La rebellion française, the historian Jean Nicolas shows how the culture of rioting was extremely sophisticated—historically, it counts as the true French national sport." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win." - 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

"The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Never ask a man if he is from Sparta: If he were, he would have let you know such an important fact - and if he were not, you could hurt his feelings." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing" - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what" - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries," - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!" - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb