Quotes from Michael Lewis

why its Lessons Learned website was dumb. The gist of it was that people don't learn what is imposed upon them but rather what they freely seek, out of desire or need. For people to learn, they need to want to learn. "How many times have you traveled by air?" Carter began, in his report to his superiors.

The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.

That was how a Salomon bond trader thought: He forgot whatever it was that he wanted to do for a minute and put his finger on the pulse of the market. If the market felt fidgety, if people were scared or desperate, he herded them like sheep into a corner, then made them pay for their uncertainty. He sat on the market until it puked gold coins. Then he worried about what he wanted to do.

In computing, a monopoly took the form of a toll booth. Bill Gates had his toll booth, the PC operating system. Jim Clark wanted his own toll booth.

Still, the equity department seemed happy, though not until I had spent some time with them did I begin to fathom why. They felt less pressure than bond traders and bond salesmen. They had accepted their lot and like the peasants in a Breughel pastoral scene were content to celebrate the simple pleasures of life. A house on the Jersey shore rather than in the Hamptons. Skiing in Vermont rather than Zermatt.

When choosing between sure things and gambles, people's desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

Despair floods the minds of unemployed beeper manufacturers, Rolex watch salesmen, and society florists.

There will no longer be truth and falsehood. There will just be stories, with two sides to them.

A banana and an apple seem more similar than they otherwise would because we've agreed to call them both fruit. Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.

At the end of the day, what do I think they are going to do?" she said. "Take all the money and give it to their banker friends. Do things like privatize water—so people in rural Florida will be paying seventy-five dollars a month for it instead of twenty dollars.

He'd detected a pattern: a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments.

That's what you do in TB control," Charity said. "The nurses take them to a hotel room and the sheriff watches them. If you think you have a shot at containing it, that's what you do. You have to do it by health officer authority. People say you can't do it, but we do it every day for TB.

An American killed by his spinach can justifiably blame the FDA, but an American killed by his steak is the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture. Cheese pizzas are the FDA's problem; pepperoni pizzas are supervised by the USDA.

Although Steve's skill with computers had been his ticket out of Leeds to Silicon Valley, he regarded the machine as, at best, an unsteady ally: it was always laying traps for the programmer.

Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.

It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart.

Whatever was happening in the White House was happening without the benefit of the people Bossert felt qualified to advise the president.

People regretted what they had done, and what they wished they hadn't done, far more than what they had not done and perhaps should have.

Meehl's book, called Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, had shown that psychoanalysts who tried to predict what would become of their neurotic patients fared poorly compared to simple algorithms.

He thought of the computer as a less than straightforward tool for controlling and manipulating the world around it, like a shovel with a loose blade.

United States congressman had asked her why the taxpayer needed to fund the National Weather Service when he could get his weather from AccuWeather. Where on earth did he think AccuWeather—or the apps or the Weather Channel— got their weather? Where was AccuWeather when winds

After a few pages, Michael Burry realized that he was no longer reading about his son but about himself.

The coroner obviously hadn't even considered the possibility that she was a trained surgeon. "Men like that always underestimate me," she said. "They think my spirit animal is a bunny. And it's a fucking dragon.

For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.