Michael Lewis Quotes - Page 5

A tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.

There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.

At SGI board meetings... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.

Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it.

When the last history of high-frequency trading is written, Hunsader, like Joe Saluzzi and Sal Arnuk of Themis Trading, deserves a prominent place in it.

I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?

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.

I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.

I procrastinate to a point where I'm filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It's usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.

My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.

The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.

There used to be this guy called Vinny who worked on the floor of the stock exchange, said one big investor who had observed the market for a long time. 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

Why pay $20 million to Harrison Ford? I dont even understand that. They think they have to do it... If someone puts a price on himself, that suggests he is irreplaceable, then he better find somewhere else to work.

Each firm held its rope; one by one, they realized that no matter how strongly they pulled, the balloon would eventually lift them off their feet.

The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.

Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.

Some coaches believed they could judge a player's performance simply by watching it. In this they were deeply mistaken. The naked eye was an inadequate tool for learning what you needed to know to evaluate baseball players and baseball games. Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. The difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is simply not visible-it is a matter of record

Thirdly-but not lastly-there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen. The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw. There was a lot you couldn't see when you watched a game

Donald Trump got almost 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton! He happened to get more in some of the right places. It was just like one of those things where a stock going up and people impose a false sense of order on it. It's really more intellectually honestly viewed as a disorderly process.

The vicious cycle that is bringing down European states is not going to hit us [the USA], at least not for a while, at the level of the federal government. The same cannot be said of state and local governments.

I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.

The incentives are still rotten, and people are still paid to do things they shouldn't be doing. The reforms did not really address the incentives, the system is still dysfunctional and there are still behavioural issues that need to be addressed.

You could argue the banks are much better capitalised than they were going into the crisis, and everyone's in a much more vigilant state because they still remember the crisis.

When an American declares bankruptcy, when he hits bottom, he can reinvent himself. There's a story he can tell. We tolerate reinvention. We encourage reinvention. That's what this country has that Europe does not. It's not just a crisis; it's an opportunity.

We have the Google family calendar. Before a week starts, my wife and I sit down to decide who's driving who to school or when can we go out on a date.