Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“I drive a hybrid, moving into an electric car. I only drink tap water, never consume food that's travelled.”

“I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.”

“What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.”

“Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.”

“Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.”

“Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.”

“We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.”

“We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.”

“The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it.”

“The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.”

“I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.”