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As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.

Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Optimism
Weird
Habit
Seem
Seems
Sometimes
Idiotic
Paying

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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.
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Icelandic people are inbred. And they have a sense of themselves as genetically special, and a history of risk-taking because they make their living on the high seas fishing. Assets generally rose in value during this period, and so it looked like they actually knew what they were doing.
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There's no point in arguing with partisan supporters. Their views are their identity. Nothing you can tell the most phlegmatic follower.
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A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.
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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.
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All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers.
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I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.
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Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
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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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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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The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.
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Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.
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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.
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Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors, including teachers' attitudes. Moreover, girls avoid situations in which failure is likely, whereas boys approach such situations as a challenge, indicating that failure differentially affects self-esteem.
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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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The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.
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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.
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Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them-to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch.
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In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.
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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.
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