It is not true, as Michel de Montaigne maintained, that the profit of one man is the damage of another.

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The French essayist Michel de Montaigne was brought up speaking Latin as his first language and as a boy read Ovid's Metamorphoses for fun.

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Writing in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne, Mr. Taleb divides the world into those who "get it" and everyone else, a world partitioned into heroes (Popper, Hayek, Yogi Berra), those on notice (Harold Bloom, necktie wearers, personal-finance advisers) and entities that are dead to him (the bell curve, newspapers, the Nobel Prize in Economics).

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