Quotes from Michael Lewis

when I ran mortgages, I religiously took people from the back office. At first I did it for moral reasons. But it worked. They appreciated it. They didn't feel like the world owed them a living. They were more loyal.

Inside every alienated hacker who thinks he stands for the "good things that ultimately don't matter to most businesses" there is a tycoon struggling to get out.

We fought with those cocksuckers all the way down," says one Deutsche Bank trader. And, all the way down, the debt collectors at Deutsche Bank sensed the bond traders at Morgan Stanley misunderstood their own trade. They weren't lying; they genuinely failed to understand the nature of the subprime CDO.

Which Wall Street big shots Eisman had insulted was a matter of which Wall Street big shots' presence Eisman was allowed into.

And who would deny that the consumer demand for ever more stuff at ever cheaper prices is one of the great deterministic forces in history?

16 billion in complex securities whose value ultimately turned on the ability of a Las Vegas stripper with five investment properties, or a Mexican strawberry picker with a single $750,000 home, to make rapidly rising interest payments.

I set out to write this book only because I thought it would be better to tell the story than to go on living the story.

This was only one of many recent changes along the capitalist food chain. Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys.

Gutfreund (pronounced Good friend) liked to sneak up from behind and surprise you. This was fun for him but not for you.

The only thing capitalism cannot survive is stability. Stability—true stability—is an absence of progress, and a dearth of new wealth.

Thousands upon thousands of government employees take to the streets to protest the bill. Here is Greece's version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don't really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies.

Back in 1996, 65 percent of subprime loans had been fixed-rate, meaning that typical subprime borrowers might be getting screwed, but at least they knew for sure how much they owed each month until they paid off the loan. By 2005, 75 percent of subprime loans were some form of floating-rate, usually fixed for the first two years.

Clark liked to say that human beings, when they took risks, fell into one of two types, pigs or chickens. "The difference between these two kinds of people," he'd say, "is the difference between the pig and the chicken in the ham-and-eggs breakfast. The chicken is interested, the pig is committed. If you are going to do anything worth doing, you need a lot of pigs." The

Historians imposed false order upon random events, too, probably without even realizing what they were doing. Amos had a phrase for this. "Creeping determinism," he called it—and jotted in his notes one of its many costs: "He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.

It's the worldview in which if people tip in a restaurant to which they will never return it counts as a puzzle.

Mike Burry didn't own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to "insure"; it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down.

I'm doing something I always dreamed about doing, and it was about the most depressing moment I've ever had in my life

As a former gas station attendant, parking lot attendant, medical resident and current Goldman Sachs screwee, I am offended.

Moore's law came with a social corollary: high-tech could not remain high-tech for long.

Meriwether was the King of the Game, the Liar's Poker champion of the Salomon Brothers' trading floor. On

Most traders divulge whether they are making or losing money by the way they speak or move. They are either overly easy or overly tense. With Meriwether you could never, ever, tell. He wore the same blank half-tense expression when he won as he did when he lost. He had, I think, a profound ability to control the two emotions that commonly destroy traders (fear and greed) and it made him as noble as a man who pursues his self-interest so fiercely can be.

For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn't, someone else would.

Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science.