Quotes by Michael Lewis

“It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it’s amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever ...”

“He shouted into the phone, “That is fuckin’ awesome. I mean fuckin’ awesome. I fuckin’ mean fucking awesome. You are one Big Swinging Dick, and don’t ever let anybody tell you different.” It brough...”

“Buy potatoes,” he said. “Gotta hop.” Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated A...”

“A man got to have a code. - Omar Little”

“The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.”

“foodstuffs absolved of the obligation to provide vitamins and minerals cavorted with reckless abandon.”

“The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, "too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And [Thaler] noticed that when he had his fellow economists to dinner, they filled up on cashews, which meant they had less appetite for the meal. More to the point, he noticed that they tended to ...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 responsibilit...”

“Weirdly—but as Danny and Amos had suspected—the further the winning number was from the number on a person's lottery ticket, the less regret they felt. "In defiance of logic, there is a definite se...”

“I hated discussing ideas with investors," he said, "because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process." Once you became an idea's defender you had a harder time...”

“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 banker...”

“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 flow...”

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

“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 ...”