Quotes from Michael Lewis

The larger the number of people involved, the easier it was for them to delude themselves that what they were doing must be smart.

It was as if this baseball coach had reached inside me, found a rusty switch marked: 'turn on before attempting use' - and flipped it.

Losing shouldn't be fun. It's not fun for me. If I'm going to be miserable, you're going to be miserable.

What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination."¶ The

The difference in Billy wasn't what had happened to him, but what hadn't. He had a life he hadn't led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed.

The power of an imagination can arise from what it refuses to foresee.

The root of the CDC's behavior was simple: fear. They didn't want to take any action for which they might later be blamed.

He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. "It was like reading the owner's manual of the human mind," he later recalled. "Not the usual owner's manual, but an owner's manual that pointed out all the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of how we

After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, "You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are.

Once handed the money, Paulson abandoned his promised strategy and instead essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a few others unnaturally selected for survival.

Had Volcker never pushed through his radical change in policy, the world would be many bond traders and one memoir the poorer.

Don't worry. You gave him the right answer." Actually, Michael was after something more important than the fate of his Briarcrest teammate. "I wanted to see what type of person he was," he said later. "If he's pulling scholarships that they'd promised kids, would you want to play for that kind of person? Be around that kind of person?" Coach O wasn't that kind of person, he decided; more interestingly, Coach

By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface. "It

Before Volcker's speech, bonds had been conservative investments, into which investors put their savings when they didn't fancy a gamble in the stock market. After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it.

If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date.

Why were they prepaying so fast? Vinny asked himself. "It made no sense to me. Then I saw that the reason the prepayments were so high is that they were involuntary.

They actually spent time wondering how people who had been so sensationally right (i.e., they themselves) could preserve the capacity for diffidence and doubt and uncertainty that had enabled them to be right. The more sure you were of yourself and your judgment, the harder it was to find opportunities premised on the notion that you were, in the end, probably wrong. The

Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen.

In eight years alone—2010–2018—the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it's because of these people.

The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?" says one trader still at Salomon. "That's easy. Strauss wouldn't stoop to use the men's room on the trading floor. He'd go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest).

market leader in interest rate swaps. There was a natural role for a blue-chip corporation with the highest credit rating to stand in the middle of swaps and long-term options and the other risk-spawning innovations. The traits required of this corporation were that it not be a bank—and thus subject to bank regulation, and the need to reserve capital against risky assets—and that it be willing and able to bury exotic risks on its

I hated discussing ideas with investors," he said, "because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process." Once you became an idea's defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it.

Goliath, dissatisfied with his size advantage, has bought David's sling.