Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.

When you have no freedom, then your life becomes the life of an animal.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

Freedom is the power to choose our own chains.

And there is no difference, in principle - but only in degree - between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.

The colonists are by the law of nature free-born, as indeed all man are, white or black...It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other men's liberty will soon care little for their own.

I cannot do politics under someone else's control.

Obedience is detachment from the self. This is the most radical detachment of all. But what is the self? The self is the principle of reason and responsibility in us. It is the root of freedom, it is what makes us men.

Freedom begins as we become conscious of it.

No man may make another free.

I don't want to live in a nanny state where people are telling me where I can go and what I can do.

We almost always have choices, and the better the choice, the more we will be in control of our lives.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.

Whenever regulation increases, personal freedom decreases.

I don't like being victimized by a machine or by other people's demands on my time. I become resentful by feeling forced or incentivized to live a life I don't want to live. That rage in general prevents me from entirely becoming enslaved by technology.

Self Control, Not State Control

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

There shall be no slavery of the mind.

The sacred right of self government … has been so perverted so that if one man decides to enslave a second man, a third man may not object.

Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else.

Liberty is the greatest blessing that men enjoy, and slavery is the heaviest curse that human nature is capable of …. those who are governed at the will of another, and whose property may be taken from them...without their consent...are in the miserable condition of slaves.

Security is no replacement for liberty.