Quotes from Michael Lewis

The Germans. They will always do the job they are given no matter what.

Nothing big happens until you close the schools. It's not like anything else. It's like a phase change. It's nonlinear. It's like when water temperature goes from thirty-three to thirty-two. When it goes from thirty-four to thirty-three, it's no big deal; one degree colder and it turns to ice.

By then science perhaps didn't need her as much: the insights at the heart of her project had become the official policy of the United States government, and were spreading rapidly from the CDC to the rest of the world.

What constitutes a gain or a loss depends on the representation of the problem and on the context in which it arises

This one they called "framing." Simply by changing the description of a situation, and making a gain seem like a loss, you could cause people to completely flip their attitude toward risk, and turn them from risk avoiding to risk seeking.

any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

The SEC, like the public stock exchanges, had a kind of equity stake in the future revenues of high-frequency traders.

Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it.

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. "Program management" is not just program management.

Clark's new enterprises: endure the humiliation of not fully understanding your job, and you might never need to work again.

All these exquisitely schooled, sophisticated people, each and every one of whom feels special, are presented with two mainly horrible ways to earn a living: trawler fishing and aluminum smelting.

chose the surgery. People facing a life-and-death decision responded not to the odds but to the way the odds were described to them.

Danny sensed already that he was very like his mother and not at all like his father. His feelings about himself were complicated.

Perhaps because they were so enamored of the official rules of finance, the Germans proved especially vulnerable to a false idea the rules encouraged: that there is such a thing as a riskless asset.

when presented with duplicates of the same ulcer, every doctor had contradicted himself

The draft has never been anything but a fucking crapshoot," Billy had taken to saying, "We take fifty guys and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for fifty a success? If you did that in the stock market, you'd go broke.

We quickly figured out that some companies actually have a moral compass and some of them don't," said Joe.

It confirmed Biederman's sense that "most advances in science come not from eureka moments but from 'hmmm, that's funny.

relentless, manic, with grandiose ambitions and private standards of performance. Parcells believed that even

Back in 1921 Veblen had predicted that engineers would one day rule the U.S. economy. He argued that since the economy was premised on technology and the engineers were the only ones who actually understood how the technology worked, they would inevitably use their superior knowledge to seize power from the financiers and captains of industry who wound up on top at the end of the first round of the Industrial Revolution.

The professors argued that Netscape courted disaster from the start, by taunting Microsoft. "Mooning the Giant

those with the least training (graduate students) were just as accurate as the fully trained ones (paid pros)

It's easy to have no observable health effects when you never look," the medical director of the Lawrence Livermore lab said, back in the 1980s, after seeing how the private contractors who ran Hanford studied the matter. In her jaw-dropping 2013 book Plutopia, University of Maryland historian Kate Brown compares and contrasts American plutonium production at Hanford and its Soviet twin, Ozersk.

There is no such thing as a riskless asset. The reason an asset pays a return is that it carries risk.