Quotes from Michael Lewis

Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.

The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don't know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.

Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient," Said Palmer. " The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.

Every form of strength is also a form of weakness," he once wrote. "Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.

He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.

Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos

The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.

The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.

The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.

If you challenge conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done. Bill James

Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.

There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn't between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.

fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.

The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.

Don't worry where I am. I'll tell you when I get there.

That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.