Quotes from Michael Lewis

When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off," he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. "I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off.

Knowledge is literally prediction," said Morey. "Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally everything you do you're trying to predict the right thing. Most people just do it subconsciously." A

If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it's better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.

I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.

That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money you can't afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you're fucked.

The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it's comforting; because it's so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.

Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.

There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?

I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.

Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.

Years later he would say that when he'd decided to become a professional baseball player, it was the only time he'd done something just for the money, and that he'd never do something just for the money ever again. He would never again let the market dictate the direction of his life.

When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of." That

A Home without Equity Is Just a Rental with Debt

Amos was not merely an optimist. He willed himself to be an optimist because he had decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it and the second time when it happens.

Germans longed to be near shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.

I lived here my whole life and I've never been to this neighborhood.' And Big Mike finally spoke up. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'I got your back.

What happens when we acknowledge the sovereignty and power of God without trusting in His goodness and faithfulness? A pitcher who saw God's power behind his extremely unlikely rise to the big leagues wondered if, at any difficulty he encountered there, God might be taking his ability away.

What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss, he said, was what not to do: beat up a kid. It's easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.

Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.

Shining a light creates shadows

The Piranha didn't talk like a person. He said things like "If you fuckin' buy this bond in a fuckin' trade, you're fuckin' fucked." And "If you don't pay fuckin' attention to the fuckin' two-year, you get your fuckin' face ripped off." Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off.

The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody