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21 " The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance. "
― Michael Lewis , Liar's Poker
22 " foodstuffs absolved of the obligation to provide vitamins and minerals cavorted with reckless abandon. "
― Michael Lewis
23 " When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens. "
― Michael Lewis , The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
24 " The way it feels to me,' he said, 'is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them. "
25 " We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle. "
― Michael Lewis , The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
26 " 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. "
27 " Holding one's self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor. The degree to which the stigma is socially apparent is the degree to which one must negotiate the issue of blame, not only for one's self but between one's self and the other who is witness to the stigma. Stigmatization is a much more powerful elicitor of shame and guilt in that it requires a negotiation not only between one's self and one's attributions, but between one's self and the attributions of others. "
28 " The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence. "
29 " The markets in the long run are no doubt driven by fundamental economic laws—if the United States runs a persistent trade deficit, the dollar will eventually plummet—but in the short run money flows less rationally. Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move. "
30 " 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. "
― Michael Lewis , Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
31 " 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. "
32 " Those who say don't know, those who know don't say "
33 " That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different. "
34 " Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders. "
35 " Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time. "
36 " Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer] "
37 " I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed. "
38 " The upper classes of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody "
― Michael Lewis , The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
39 " Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know,” said "
40 " If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification. "