Quotes from Michael Lewis

All these texts tried in one way or another to explain the strange uniformity of the American businessman. He commuted to work in his immaculate gray suit from his neat suburban tract house. He kept his front lawn and his hair trimmed to lengths tacitly agreed upon by his peers. He avoided high culture, or anything else that smacked of elitism. He worked for some enormous gray corporation such as IBM or AT&T that was more of a home to him than his house in the suburbs.

Everywhere one turned, one found idiocies that were commonly accepted as truths only because they were embedded in a theory to which the scientists had yoked their careers.

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 the stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.

Golfing with Eisman wasn't like golfing with other Wall Street people. The round usually began with a collective discomfort on the first tee, after Eisman turned up wearing something that violated the Wall Street golfer's notion of propriety.

The one shot America had at behaving well, and thus saving itself, was to remove the feeling that "the government" was imposing restrictions on people and re-instill the idea that people

Moses could have walked in the door, and if he said he came from fixed income, Vinny wouldn't have trusted him

Eisman took the cart to the clubhouse and bought a hoodie. The hoodie covered up his t-shirt and made him look a lot like a guy who had just bought a hoodie to cover up his t-shirt.

maybe it was just the speed of his car. All he had to do is gun some machine into its highest gear to rediscover the sunny side of life.

The markets were now run by technology, but the technologists were still treated like tools. Nobody bothered to explain the business to them, but they were forced to adapt to its demands and exposed to its failures—which

Knowledge is literally prediction," said Morey. "Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally everything you do you're trying to predict the right thing.

The book, truth be told, left the reader feeling that there was little that might have been done to prevent all those people from dying.

What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.

What was the point of laying out the odds of a gamble if the person taking it either didn't believe the numbers or didn't want to know them.

We listened to the man because he had something to tell us, and us alone. Not how to play baseball, though he did that better than anyone. Not how to win, though winning was wonderful. Not even how to sacrifice. He was teaching us something far more important: how to cope with the two greatest enemies of a well-lived life, fear and failure. To make the lesson stick, he made sure we encountered enough of both.

There is nothing like the ticker tape except a woman – nothing that promises, hour after hour, day after day, such sudden developments; nothing that disappoints so often or that occasionally fulfills with such unbelievable, passionate magnificence.

the medical-industrial complex. It wasn't designed for a crisis; if it was designed for anything, it was to maximize the profits of companies that enjoyed monopoly power.

People were soon saying how brave Messonnier had been to say that the virus could not be stopped. To Charity, her words sounded like the CDC letting itself off the hook for failing even to try.

says. "There's only one Moses, but I'm not sure there's a Moses here." But Howard Mudd, who coached the Chargers' offensive line at the time, an

He wanted to hire him without being able to fully explain, to his bosses or even to Ronan, what he wanted to hire him for. He couldn't very well call him Vice President in Charge of Explaining to My Clueless Superiors Why High-Frequency Trading Is a Travesty. So he called him High-Frequency Trading Strategist.

Existing energy businesses—oil companies, utilities—are obviously hostile to government-sponsored competition. At the same time, they are essentially commodity businesses, without a lot of fat in them. The stock market does not reward even big oil companies for research and development that will take decades to pay off. And the sort of research that might lead to huge changes in energy production often doesn't pay off for decades.

Social interventions, if done early, could have huge effects on disease transmission; in the extreme they could contain it.

Fracking—to take one example—was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE.

People who had post-traumatic stress disorder were considered weaklings," as one Israeli psychologist put it. Part of the job of being an Israeli Jew was to at least pretend to forget the unforgettable.

To raise abortion with Steve Forbes seems about as natural as telling your grandmother that you got laid last Saturday night.