Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

One cannot always be right in our complex world; no dishonor attends an incorrect choice among plausible outcomes drawn from a properly constructed argument.

The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.

Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.

Everyone complains of his memory, but no one complains of his judgment.

But what if our intelligence is wrong?

If we want the best judgment of our intelligence personnel, we have to accept the fact that they will be wrong sometimes.

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.

Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.

It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives

It is easier to rationalize than it is to be rational.

False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse.

Men first make up their minds (and the smaller the mind the sooner made up), and then seek for the reasons; and if they chance to stumble upon a good reason, of course they do not reject it. But though they are right, they are only right by chance.

I had ... come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.

There are some people as obtuse in recognizing an argument as they are in appreciating wit. You couldn't drive it into their heads with a hammer.

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

Reason adapts impulses and beliefs into the real world; rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual. Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.

We can't avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.

The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.

Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.

To cut off the confusion and accept an answer just because it's too scary not to have an answer is a good way to get the wrong answer.

When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.