Quotes from Michael Lewis

A new trader could leap into a market and trade frantically inside it without adding anything of value to it.

I love Greg," said one of his bosses at Deutsche Bank. "I have nothing bad to say about him except that he's a fucking whack job.

Take a piece of paper and fold it in half, then fold it in half again, for a total of 50 times folding it in half. If a piece of paper is 0.004 inches thick to begin with, by the time you fold it 50 times, it is more than 70 million miles thick.

The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks.

a quote from the ancient orator Isocrates: "Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.

new strategy. It had three parts to it: to detect outbreaks overseas so they might remain there; to stockpile vaccines and antiviral drugs; and, finally, to "be ready to respond at the federal, state and local levels in the event that a pandemic reaches our shores.

he needed them to translate his extraordinary ambition into the ordinary language understood by corporate America.

From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay.

The man who groped for the new new thing was in many ways ill suited for mainstream business.

Daryl Morey believed—if he believed in anything—in taking a statistically based approach to decision making. And the most important decision he made was whom to allow onto his basketball team. "Your mind needs to be in a constant state of defense against all this crap that is trying to mislead you," he said. "We're always trying to figure out what's a trick and what's real. Are we seeing a hologram? Is this an illusion?

Someone once said that the best technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clark now had the best magic act in Silicon Valley. The best magic act attracted many of the best engineers. In the Valley it often did. The Valley had given engineers a place where they could make their living outside the enormous gray corporations that expected them to conform. It

One of these people—a Canadian, of all things—stands at the picture's center, organizing the many smaller pictures into a coherent whole.

The United States took this on as a national priority before anyone in the world

Clark had invented the technology, bet his career on it, and been right. He had attracted the most talented engineers in Silicon Valley to his company, and they in turn created the most talented computers.

The sensors measured everything that Clark could think to measure, including the pressure on the engine. They passed these measurements up to the programmable logic controllers. The

Clark knew that the time would come to put a smiley corporate face on his ferocious ambition.

One of Leibowitz's favorite stories was about a donkey placed equidistant from two bundles of hay. In the story the donkey can't decide which bundle of hay is closer to him, and so dies of hunger.

As communicable disease spreads through social networks, Richard reasoned, you had to find ways to disrupt those networks.

genomic sequencing

It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it's amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no story involving Arabs could ever be refuted. So if you didn't know why the dollar was falling, you shouted out something about Arabs.

Maybe disease outbreaks need a warning like the one on your car mirror—things are much larger than they appear.

Premised as they were not on profits but on perceptions, these new Internet businesses were still all but unrecognizable to the Serious American Executive.

The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren't taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all.

His willingness to throw open a window on the American financial world, and to show people what it has become, still takes my breath away.