John H

“For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life