Quotes About Manias

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

They succumb to the egotistical delusion that they can predict the future, instead of recognizing the limits of their knowledge. And they leap blindly into manias, their judgment fogged by "return envy" and the fear of missing out.

While religious and financial manias might seem to have little in common, the underlying forces that give them rise are identical: the desire to improve one's well-being in this life or the next. And the factors that amplify the contagion of financial and religious mass delusions are also similar: the hardwired human propensity to imitate, to fabricate and consume compelling narratives, and to seek status.

Manifestly, man is the ape that imitates, tells stories, seeks status, morally condemns others, and yearns for the good old days, all of which guarantee a human future studded with religious and financial mass manias.

Conservatives, please. Let's not duplicate the manias of the Left as we figure out how to deal with Mr. Obama. He is not exactly the anti-Christ, although a disturbing number of people on the Right are convinced he is.

Yes, Charles is a genius, and he loves his manias. But Charles's disorder is the gift nobody wants to be given. There is no cure for it, no solution. Either Charles takes his medications and suffers, or he doesn't and everyone else does. It is colossally, sickeningly, definitively unfair.

Wealth, the war [WW1], and the phobias, manias, dementias, prejudices and terrors that come from both, were the dominant factors.

We hope the future will turn out well, but we fear it won't. As members of the crowd we will always take these emotions to extremes. When the herd instinct combines with hope and fear in a market environment, we get panics and manias.

The passionate desire to conclude is one of humanity's most pernicious and sterile manias.

A great man's manias must be respected, because the time required to combat them is too precious to waste.

Savez-vous que c'est à cause de cette recherche de ce que j'appellerais les compensations, cette rechercher d'un bonheur malgré tout, que naissent les manies et, souvent, les déséquilibres.

When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes because belief in it is slackening, the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum is filled by the gas of emotion. Everyone proclaims what best suits his interests, his whims, his intellectual manias. To escape the void and the perplexities of his own soul, a man will rush to join any party standard that is being carried through the streets. With society gone there remain only parties.

On December 7, 1999, Kevin Landis, portfolio manager of the Firsthand mutual funds, appeared on CNN's Moneyline telecast. Asked if wireless telecommunication stocks were overvalued—with many trading at infinite multiples of their earnings—Landis had a ready answer. "It's not a mania," he shot back. "Look at the outright growth, the absolute value of the growth. It's big.

Aprendió a desviar los impulsos de violencia, que a veces se apoderaban de ellos como tormentas pasajeras, y no la asustaban la avaricia o las manías persecutorias que algunos sufrían como consecuencia de la soledad.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

Actually, the leap of faith - to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it - is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a leap that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias.

And there's no saying what heady potions we won't concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won't imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.

La sociedad era horrible porque estaba loca. La sociedad civilizada es un despropósito. El dinero y el llamado amor son sus dos grandes manías; con el dinero muy a la cabeza. En su inconexa locura el individuo se identifica a sí mismo de esas dos formas: dinero y amor

Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the manias of lust.

Daniel Kahneman, who was the first psychologist to win the Nobel Prize in Economics (see my podcast episode #212), attributed market manias to investors' illusion of control, calling the illusion prospect theory. He studied the intellectual underpinnings of investing—how traders estimate odds and calculate risks—to prove how often people act from the mistaken belief they know more than they do.

A boom-and-bust pattern has been well chronicled since the publication of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in 1841. In it, Scottish author Charles Mackay probed the human tendency to run amok in pursuit of quick profits, dating back to a mania for tulip bulbs as expensive as houses in seventeenth-century Holland.