Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?

Every form of strength is also a form of weakness.

Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.

We change for the good so long as good exists around us.

All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers.

My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.

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

There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.

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

Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.

The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged.

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.

I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.

The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy football bears to the NFL.

When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.

People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.

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

The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.

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

He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.

When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.

He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.

I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?

I'd say part of the appeal of Trump is that he's presenting himself as a totally certain, infallible person.

Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.

The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.

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.

Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with it.

In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.

My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.

I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.

Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

It is far better to keep the enemy close, by bribing him with stock options, than to have him out in the wild, foraging.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.

I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.

Don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them.

That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .

Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.

People in the voting booth are not purely rational creatures any more than they're purely rational creatures outside the voting booth.

You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before.

There's no point in arguing with partisan supporters. Their views are their identity. Nothing you can tell the most phlegmatic follower.

I don't think there is a national pasttime. Watching TV is a national pasttime. Really. If there is a national pasttime, it is watching TV.

One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.

The fuses had been lit and could not be extinguished. All that remained was to observe the speed of the spark, and the size of the explosions.

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