Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal.

The more money you take away from families is the less power that family has. And that's a basic power.

So, we have in America today, my friends, a condition by which about 10 men dominate the means of activity in at least 85 percent of the activities that you own. They either own directly everything or they have got some kind of mortgage on it, with a very small percentage to be excepted. They own the banks, they own the steel mills, they own the railroads, they own the bonds, they own the mortgages, they own the stores, and they have chained the country from one end to the other

The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.

I'm against the Right of money and the Left of money.

Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is his prophet.

The possessors of wealth can scarcely be indifferent to processes which, nearly or remotely have been the fertile source of their possessions.

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.

Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.

Bonuses balance my budget in New York City. The bigger the bonuses on Wall Street, the more money I had to spend on poor people. The New York City budget is determined greatly by the bonuses given on Wall Street.

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.

He who has his thumb on the purse has the power.

People without money are slaves.

Whoever owns the means of credit controls the industrial life of the nation.

… a union of power in the same hands over industry, commerce and finance, with a resulting power over public affairs.

The capitalist free market is a marvelous servant but a disastrous master. In one of the greatest achievements of the second half of this [the 20th] century, a few favored societies learned to convert it from master to servant. The danger now is that a smug and vainglorious capitalism will not remember the lesson.

On the one side stand the corporate interests of the United States, the moneyed interests, aggregated wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless.... On the other side an unnumbered throng, those who gave the Democratic party a name and for whom it has assumed to speak.

The upper 1 percent, the people down on Wall Street, the corporate executives, they're the people that control this economy.

Money has a language of its own.

High levels of economic inequality lead to imbalances in political power, as those at the top use their economic weight to shape our politics in ways that give them more economic power.

Money ... is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, the state is able to gain unquestioned control over the unit of all accounts, the state will then be in a position to dominate the entire economic system, and the whole society.

The banks run the place.

The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.

Riches are the savings of many in the hands of one.

Gold will be slave or master.