Quotes from Michael Lewis

It's not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria - to believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded - without being insane.

The American Home of the Future, it went without saying, would be controlled and monitored by a computer. The computer would permit the owner to enter into a new, fantastic relationship with his dwelling.

There is another way to think of John MacWilliams's fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.

He wondered, often, what it would look like if and when the shit in question hit the fan: The stock market at bottom was rigged. The icon of global capitalism was a fraud. How would enterprising politicians and plaintiffs' lawyers and state attorneys general respond to that news?

It actually went pretty well, until they got onto the topic of marijuana. "So you got caught smoking weed your freshman and sophomore years," said the Rockets interviewer. "What happened your junior year?" Williams just shook his head and said, "They stopped testing me. And if you're not going to test me, I'm gonna smoke!

The general idea was to sell their software first to rich technophiles and then, gradually, infiltrate the minds of the middle-class owners of suburban tract houses.

the risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don't. Which brought us to the fifth risk.

They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes--whether it turned out to be right or wrong--but by the process that led to it. The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

In context the computer programmers appeared idle. They sat quietly, stared into their screens and sipped cappuccinos. And yet they were by far the most important people on board Hyperion.

Post Katrina) . . . He was reminded of the first time he'd run on a track with spikes. You just fly on the track. The poor kids he saw in New Orleans were trying to run the same race in life that he was. But he was wearing spikes and they weren't. There's a real idealism that you have to indulge to think that people in New Orleans were now going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There were no bootstraps.

Microsoft had made it clear that the only way to preserve your station in Valley life was to create a monopoly. If you created a monopoly, you were at least partially exempt from the ordinary rapid cycle of creation and destruction.

The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people who didn't use it.

The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a 'collective good' sense.

It's Groundhog Day," said Max. "The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say, 'This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I've ever worked with.' This happens over and over and over.

Subprime borrowers tended to be one broken refrigerator away from default. Few

They end when the career ends

He had little patience for the mystical, spiritual approach of computer programming.

Time is a variable continuum.

No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.

Wall Street bond trading desks, staffed by people making seven figures a year, set out o coax from the brain-dead guys making high five figures the highest possible ratings for the worst possible loans. They performed the task with Ivy League thoroughness and efficiency.

a thousand people don't build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find.

Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling.

The trouble was that clarity and simplicity were more important in computer language than in human language.

Wing Chau didn't know he'd been handpicked by Greg Lippmann to persuade Steve Eisman that the people on the other end of his credit default swaps were either crooks or morons, but he played the role anyway.