Michael Lewis

Buy potatoes,_ he said. __otta 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 American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them.

It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it__ amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no story involving Arabs could ever be refuted. So if you didn__ know why the dollar was falling, you shouted out something about Arabs.

He shouted into the phone, __hat is fuckin_ awesome. I mean fuckin_ awesome. I fuckin_ mean fucking awesome. You are one Big Swinging Dick, and don__ ever let anybody tell you different._ It brought tears to my eyes to hear it, to be called a Big Swinging Dick by the man who, years ago, had given birth to the distinction and in my mind had the greatest right to confer it upon me.

The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?_ says one trader still at Salomon. __hat__ easy. Strauss wouldn__ stoop to use the men__ room on the trading floor. He__ go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.

...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.

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.

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

Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn__ go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn__ ever do it twice.

The triple of Jeremy Brown's imagination, in reality, is a home run.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don__ need to make smart decisions__f they can get rich making dumb decisions?

Danny explained, __eforms always create winners and losers, and the losers will always fight harder than the winners._ How did you get the losers to accept change? The prevailing strategy on the Israeli farms _ which wasn__ working very well _ was to bully or argue with the people who needed to change. The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it, Danny told the students. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. __n one case the overall tension is reduced,_ he said, __nd in the other it is increased._ And that was a sort of proof that there was an advantage in reducing the tensions. __t__ a key idea,_ said Danny. __aking it easy to change.

He was the guy who always won the game of chicken because his opponents suspected he might actually enjoy a head-on collision.

What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.

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.

If you__e got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.

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

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.

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.