Quotes from Michael Lewis

There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.

Corporate finance, which services the corporations and governments that borrow money, and that are known as "clients," is, by comparison, a refined and unworldly place. Because they don't risk money, corporate financiers are considered wimps by traders.

Walking through the ruins, she saw all over again what she had seen so many times: how much better Americans were at responding to a disaster than preventing it.

By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.

Making profits on Wall Street is a bit like eating the stuffing from a turkey. Some higher authority must first put the stuffing into the turkey. The turkey was stuffed more generously in the 1980s than ever before.

The way the creative process works is that .you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.

Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.

The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became—though even to use words like "corrupt" and "sinister" made serious people uncomfortable, and so Brad avoided them.

He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.

He was the person for whom the clock was always running out, the game was always tied, and the ball was always in his hands.

not because he had the slightest interest in God but because he was curious about its internal contradictions.

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

If it doesn't happen, it never was going to happen. If you never did it, it wasn't there to begin with.

The guy walks around with a banana in his ear. And people are like, 'Why do you have a banana in your ear?' He says, 'To keep the alligators away! There are no alligators! See?

The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.

The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as arduous is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, writers, musicians, and on and on and on.

Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don't know

The problems that had been Obama's problems for the past eight years were about to become Trump's problems. But his people didn't seem to want to know about them.

There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure." "What will the price of oil be in ten years?" was such a question. That didn't mean you gave up trying to find an answer; you just couched that answer in probabilistic terms.

After the war Avi, by then twenty-two years old, finally decided what he would study: psychology. Had you asked him just then why he picked psychology, "I would say I want to understand the human soul. Not the mind. The soul.

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

I'm not paying you for the player you used to be, I'm paying you for the player you are right now.

Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.

Those who say don't know, those who know don't say