Quotes from Michael Lewis

As the U.S. stock market had grown less comprehensible, it had also become more sensationally erratic.

don't do favors. I accumulate debts. —Ancient Sicilian motto

The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?' he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.

And then we would go to our clients and tell them we could predict the price of oil. No one can predict the price of oil. It was basically nonsense.

Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government's true level of indebtedness. For these trades Goldman Sachs—which, in effect, handed Greece a $1 billion loan—carved out a reported $300 million in fees.

Using the most conservative assumptions suggested by the cruise ship—an attack rate of 20 percent and a fatality rate of half of 1 percent—you wound up with 330,000 dead Americans.

He said they wanted a place where they could just sit and talk to each other all day long without the distraction of a university, said Slovic

A Schwalling is when he does something unintentionally idiotic that makes him look stupid

I don't do favors. I accumulate debts. —Ancient Sicilian motto

The government was the mission of an entire society: why was the society undermining it? "I'm routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government," she said. "The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer.

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn't teach us anything. O

The irrational behavior of the few would not be offset by the rational behavior of the many. People could be systematically wrong, and so markets could be systematically wrong, too.

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small.

Morgan Stanley wanted to be able to trade for itself in a way it could not trade for its customers; it just didn't want to seem as if it wanted to.

Inside him a quality and a chemical—intelligence and testosterone—wrestled for hegemony. At the moment the chemical was winning on points.

You know when you're with someone who is intellectually powerful: You just know it.

After Trump took office, DJ Patil watched with wonder as the data disappeared across the federal government.

So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.

the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. "Trump was like . . . I love the Bangles! You know that song 'Walk Like an Egyptian'?" recalled one of his advisers on

found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. "It

quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

Cornwall had a problem more immediate than the collapse of society as we know it: the collapse of Bear Stearns.

the bond market, because Wall Street was now making even bigger money packaging and selling and shuffling around America's growing debts.

Trump ignored the advice and nominated Puzder. In the controversy that followed, Puzder not only failed to be confirmed but stepped down from his job at the fast-food company.)