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The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.

Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Men
Teaches
Wise
Teach
History
Doesn
Anything
Thing

More quotes by Michael Lewis

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The Germans made just about every bad investment you could have made in the last 10 years. They invested in Icelandic banks. They invested in Greek government bonds. They were heavy into Irish banks, big into Irish banks, and they bought U.S. subprime mortgage bonds.
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Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.
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Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with it.
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It's such a pain in the ass to write a book, I can't imagine writing one if I'm not interested in the subject.
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One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.
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It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.
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Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.
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I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me me as totally preposterous-which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from.
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Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.
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We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.
Michael Lewis
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In Wall Street now, you have to hide what you're doing. It's more fun when you don't have to do that. But I don't think its sense of purpose has changed at all.
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My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.
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He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.
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I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.
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There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.
Michael Lewis
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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.
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Time and space are absolute. Diseases are evil spirits that inhabit the body. Parallel lines never meet. The earth is the center of the universe. Children are miniature adults. At one time in history each of these beliefs was generally held to be true. Each, however, gave way to different ideas and even different world views.
Michael Lewis
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Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient, Said Palmer. The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.
Michael Lewis
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In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.
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Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.
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