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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
Weird
Habit
Seem
Seems
Sometimes
Idiotic
Paying
Optimism

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Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.
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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.
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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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I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.
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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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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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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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If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it.
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Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.
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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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You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before.
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When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.
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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.
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In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.
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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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My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.
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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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People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.
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