Quote

There's a certain status to suffering in Ireland, that the person who - if you're sitting around a table, the person with the greatest status is the person who had the most horrible thing happen to them most recently.

Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Status
Happens
Table
Around
Tables
Certain
Horrible
Persons
Sitting
Person
Greatest
Thing
Ireland
Happen
Recently
Suffering

More quotes by Michael Lewis

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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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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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When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.
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All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.
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What's fun is watching actors of that calibre bring them to life. It's incredible. Christian Bale spent a day with the character he plays and after my year of being with him I couldn't have generated the same view of him. They have a different way of looking at people, it's fascinating to watch.
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A vast industry of stockbrokers, financial planners, and investment advisers skims a fortune for themselves off the top in exchange for passing their clients' money on to people who, as a whole, cannot possibly outperform the market.
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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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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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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.
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People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.
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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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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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The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.
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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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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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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 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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He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.
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The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people who didn't use it.
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Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.
Michael Lewis