Quotes from Michael Lewis

lot of that money went to big grain producers. The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversation turned to handouts to big grain producers. "The money follows the political power of the constituencies

Debt ownership in a shaky enterprise means control, for when a company fails to meet its interest payments, a bondholder can foreclose and liquidate the company.

What do you mean there is no bathrobe in my suite??!!

A man who can tell a good story can make a good living as a broker.

You know what gets me excited about a guy? I get excited about a guy when he has something about him that causes everyone else to overlook him and I know that it is something that just doesn't matter." When

His life was dedicated to the fine art of tearing down and building anew.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him. —Leo Tolstoy, 1897

On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess.

People with Asperger's couldn't control what they were interested in. It was a stroke of luck that his special interest was financial markets and not, say, collecting lawn mower catalogues.

What's amazing is that they make a market in this fantasy stuff," said Druskin. "It's not a real asset.

The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A.

That was somewhere near the middle of a modern gold rush. Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in New York and London.

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

The trouble, Danny suspected, was that "the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don't communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real—that they are just something on somebody's mind.

Knowledge is literally prediction," said Morey. "Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally

scale. The American institutions built to manage risk and respond to a virus had been engaged in a weird simulation of crisis response that did not involve actually trying to stop the virus. "The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn't possible

You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That's when you need to stop and check your thinking...Beware of the delirious guy in the emergency unit with the long history of alcoholism, because you will say, 'He's just drunk,' and you'll miss the subdural hematoma.

The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see.

Our players aren't our problem. But we are what our record says we are.

The final two words of his challenge, "no tears", meant that the loser was expected to suffer a great deal of pain, but wasn't entitled to whine, bitch or moan about it. He'd just have to hunker down and keep his poverty to himself.

Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation. —Warren Buffett

In the end he plotted both the deaths and the restrictions imposed to prevent them, and saw that the earlier the restrictions imposed in any given outbreak, the fewer the deaths. In the case of Philadelphia, he wrote, "the closing of schools and churches, banning of public meetings, and banning of large public gatherings occurred relatively late into the epidemic"—nearly one month after the outbreak began and just a week before its peak.

After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir.

In something like an instant the man had changed his life. He reinvented his relationship to the world around him in a way that is considered normal only in California.