"A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Mathematics See all quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb →

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“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”

“Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness... He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo ... He discovered... the runs were not purely random. ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory.”

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.”

“Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.”

“When conflicted between two choices, take neither.”

“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives wh…"

— Tom Lehrer

Mathematics1928–2025

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"What gives me grounds for optimism is that this is the only country on the face of the Earth where if you tell a 10-year-old kid, "You can't do" something and it strikes him as absurd, a 10-year-old k…"

— Alan Charles Kors

Education1943

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"She wanted to tell me. Maybe she even tried. But she couldn't. It wasn't because I was only twelve. It was because I was her child, created by her and Father because they wanted to be in bed together …"

— William Faulkner

Literature1923–1962

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"Why do my YouTube videos get millions of views even though it’s just some ranty Northerner sat in front of a world map behind a webcam? It’s because people are desperately searching for an alternative…"

— Paul Joseph Watson

Journalism1982

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