Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

…nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want.

The rich are not a contented tribe. The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, so insistent, they often decide they must insulate themselves. Insulation eventually breeds a mild form of paranoia.

As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.

In bad times, the rich usually get richer.

The affluent society makes no meaningful distinction between luxury and necessity.

The rich are few everywhere, the poor many.

There are only two families in the whole world, my old grandmother used to say, The Haves and the Have-Nots.

When I was a young fellow I was very much disturbed by there being some people with lots of money and lots of people with no money.

This contempt for money is a trick developed by the rich to keep the poor without it.

There's more poor people in this country than there are rich, and I stick up for the poor people.

I do not like the rich.

It's a little hard not to be an elitist when you're making millions of dollars a year.

We have a new class in this country: the deserving rich. ... The deserving rich do nice things for each other. Comforting the unafflicted is something that comes naturally to them.

Boarding school didn't feel like my world, I felt like an alien; people there had a lot of money.

Choice dependent on wealth; those are the Tory words.

The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

We've never been people that go around and confront people that have been financially successful and say, 'We hate you. We envy you because of how well you're doing.'

When the idle poor become the idle rich, you'll never know just who is who, or which is which.

We're running out of rich people in this country.

When people get rich, they cut themselves off from the context that has earned them these riches - the context of the common men. They forget they are part of society.

I have a feeling that life as a billionaire in Silicon Valley is very different than the life that you or I would lead. Unless you're a billionaire; I don't know your financial situation.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Wealthy people have not disappeared, they are just not so willing to show off their wealth.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.