Michael Lewis

"The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours"

"People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is right."

"Those who say don't know, those who know don't say"

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

"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 changing your mind about it."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds."

"The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual."