Quotes from Michael Lewis

Could Morgan Stanley please wire $1.2 billion to Deutsche Bank by the end of the day?

working on this book has been those long

Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence. "Lenny

It's sort of like the flood's about to happen and you're Noah. You're on the ark. Yeah, you're okay. But you are not happy looking out at the flood. That's not a happy moment for Noah.

If you ever care to see how all the world's most awful jokes spread, spend a day on a bond trading desk. When the Challenger space shuttle disintegrated, six people called me from six points on the globe to explain that NASA stands for "Need Another Seven Astronauts.

The price volatility within each trading day in the U.S. stock market between 2010 and 2013 was nearly 40 percent higher than the volatility between 2004 and 2006, for instance. There were days in 2011 in which volatility was higher than in the most volatile days of the dot-com bubble.

Pascal, Faith is God made sensible to the heart, then

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.

He was pressured to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat did not come naturally to Steve Eisman. He could fake upbeat, and sometimes did, but he was happier not bothering.

The members of Hyperion's crew were now pigs, for a very simple reason: they all had a stake in Clark's Internet businesses.

He's sort of a prick in a way, but he's smart and honest and fearless." "Even

After Sencer—or after Foege—the CDC's relationship to disease control had changed in ways that eliminated its need for bravery. It had begun a descent. It had replaced the flowers on its porch with fake ones and hoped no one would notice. But people did notice, at least those who came close to the porch. Rajeev Venkayya had seen things that caused him to exclude the CDC from playing a role in the invention of pandemic planning.

She'd heard a line once that still resonated with her: The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.

Clark couldn't stand the idea of anyone's working for him without having the chance to accumulate a bit of wealth.

He's not tactically rude," his wife explains. "He's sincerely rude. He knows everyone thinks of him as a character but he doesn't think of himself that way. Steven lives inside his head." When

Who do you work for? That question haunted salesmen. Whenever a trader screwed a customer and the salesman became upset, the trader would ask the salesman, "Who do you work for anyway?" The message was clear: You work for Salomon Brothers. You work for me. I pay your bonus at the end of the year. So just shut up, you geek.

The Centers for Disease Control, the apex authority, wasn't of much practical use to her. The distance they had put between themselves and her when she closed Thomashefsky's clinic was of a piece with their general behavior. She'd repeatedly seen the tendency to flee when conflict arose.

there is no name for what he's looking for, which, typically, is a technology, or an idea, on the cusp of commercial viability. The new new thing.

The enemy was a virus. The enemy's chief weapon was rapid and random mutation. It might well necessitate big changes of strategy, and these were bound to be viewed by the public as signs of ineptitude, and the president would need to seem to be the one to rescue these situations rather than be rescued from them.

How could anyone be so stupid as to trust a trader? The best thing I could do was pretend to others at Salomon that I had meant to screw the customer. People would respect that. That was called jamming. I had just jammed bonds, albeit unknowingly, for the first time. I had lost my innocence.

the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

They were combing the markets for bets whose true odds were 10:1, priced as if the odds were 100:1.

A driver talking on a cell phone was four times as likely as a driver who wasn't to be involved in a crash, whether or not he held the phone in his hands

When he noticed that pro basketball stars were far less likely to be called for traveling than lesser players, he didn't just holler at the refs. He stopped watching basketball altogether; the injustice of it killed his interest in the sport.