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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 39e0b36 | However politically desirable a republic might be, it remains unable to compete imaginatively with monarchy because monarchy in principle more completely mirrors the nature of divine authority. One of the great imaginative advantages of the genre of fairy-tale or romance is to allow for the presentation of such a principle. In fairy-tale the author can leave behind the shallows of the 'realistic' novel, and is free to show the reader someth.. | Michael Ward | ||
| 8e353d4 | Clark liked to say that human beings, when they took risks, fell into one of two types, pigs or chickens. "The difference between these two kinds of people," he'd say, "is the difference between the pig and the chicken in the ham-and-eggs breakfast. The chicken is interested, the pig is committed. If you are going to do anything worth doing, you need a lot of pigs." The" | Michael Lewis | ||
| 95c2b13 | After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 278ae9a | Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was buy Ireland. From each other. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, has made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the property-related losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10.6 trillion.) At the rate money flows into the Irish treasu.. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 3e766bc | The fact that it is such an opaque industry should be alarming," Brad said. "The fact that the people who make the most money want the least clarity possible--that should be alarming, too." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 81d12b9 | It was as if this baseball coach had reached inside me, found a rusty switch marked: 'turn on before attempting use' - and flipped it. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 6446b0f | What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they'd ever seen this little man," says McCarthy. "And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That's when everyone panicked." | Michael Lewis | ||
| b98fded | Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. "Yes . . . and" rather than "No . . . but." "The idiot is bound by his pride," he says. "It always has to be his way. This is also true of the person who is deceptive or doing things wrong: he always tries to justify himself. A person who is bright in regard to his spiritual life is humble. He accepts what others tell him--criticism, ideas--and he works with them." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 565b0c7 | The first day after the merger, Brad got a call from a worried female employee, who whispered, "There is a guy in here with suspenders walking around with a baseball bat in his hands, taking swings." That turned out to be Carlin's CEO, Jeremy Frommer, who, whatever else he was, was not RBC nice. One of Frommer's signature poses was feet up on his desk, baseball bat swinging wildly over his head while some poor shoeshine guy tried to polish .. | Michael Lewis | ||
| ac1f88a | The nice thing about things that are urgent," he liked to say, "is that if you wait long enough they aren't urgent anymore." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 254556a | ratings in the NFL. Then Kemp, too, was injured. His replacement was a fellow named Mike Moroski, so obscure that any question concerning his NFL career would be considered out of bounds in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Moroski had been with the 49ers for exactly two weeks before he became, by default, their starting quarterback. He completed 57.5 percent of his passes. Eventually people must have noticed. As Walsh performed miracle after mira.. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 3de3b1d | As they worked through the order types, they created a taxonomy of predatory behavior in the stock market. Broadly speaking, it appeared as if there were three activities that led to a vast amount of grotesquely unfair trading. The first they called "electronic front-running"--seeing an investor trying to do something in one place and racing him to the next. (What had happened to Brad, when he traded at RBC.) The second they called "rebate .. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 679f5e7 | A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins' linemen put it, "No human being should be six four, two forty-five, and run a four-five forty." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 5d47349 | The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The HFT firms posted these tiny orders on BATS--orders to buy or sell 100 shares of basically every stock traded in the U.S. market--not because they actually wanted to buy and sell the stocks but because they wanted to find out what investors wante.. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 07744fa | Then came the so-called flash crash. At 2:45 on May 6, 2010, for no obvious reason, the market fell six hundred points in a few minutes. A few minutes later, like a drunk trying to pretend he hadn't just knocked over the fishbowl and killed the pet goldfish, it bounced right back up to where it was before. If you weren't watching closely you could have missed the entire event--unless, of course, you had placed orders in the market to buy or.. | Michael Lewis | ||
| a5a06cd | A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins' linemen put it, "No human being should be six four, two forty-five, and run a four-five forty." Bill Parcells thought Taylor's size and speed were closer to the beginning than to the end of the explanation. New York Giants' scouts were scouring the country for.. | Michael Lewis | ||
| b058add | She dropped the matter, and his birthday remained May 28. Armed with the Social Security card, the birth certificate, and the letter from Principal Simpson of the Briarcrest Christian School, they drove the next day to the Department of Motor Vehicles. This time they had Collins in tow. Collins | Michael Lewis | ||
| f7ef28a | This was tricky. They had, right now, at home, boxes of letters addressed to Michael from college football coaches and boosters and just people who wanted to get to know the future star. They had a personal letter from Congressman Harold Ford Jr., who seemed to want to become Michael's friend, and a stack of letters from a football coach at the University of Alabama, who seemed prepared to offer his hand in marriage. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 5aba4d8 | Light fades as it travels; the fainter it becomes, the less capable it is of transmitting data. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 121a8a7 | When Neil Armstrong took his small step from Apollo 11 and looked around, he probably thought, Wow, sort of like Iceland--even though the moon was nothing like Iceland. But then, he was a tourist, and 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. When .. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 9e2448e | Microsoft had made it clear that the only way to preserve your station in Valley life was to create a monopoly. If you created a monopoly, you were at least partially exempt from the ordinary rapid cycle of creation and destruction. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 688ff6d | He had little patience for the mystical, spiritual approach of computer programming. | Michael Lewis | ||
| be5baae | a thousand people don't build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 1763153 | Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 78abb50 | The trouble was that clarity and simplicity were more important in computer language than in human language. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 9a60d42 | The smart person accepts. The idiot insists. | Michael Lewis | ||
| fef37df | Success was his chosen form of revenge. | Michael Lewis | ||
| df3930e | Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven't really earned. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 8ea599d | there must be some connection between his excessively romantic attitude toward computer programming and his appeal to women. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 7dea29a | The trick was not simply to write the code that turned information into pictures but to find the best pictures to draw--shapes and colors that led the mind to meaning. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 4da6b9e | Why had so much conventional wisdom been bullshit? And not just in sports but across the whole society. Why had so many industries been ripe for disruption? Why was there so much to be undone? | Michael Lewis | ||
| f5a99f1 | With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow. | Michael Lewis | ||
| cb97605 | The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 381f55f | Shining a light creates shadows | Michael Lewis | ||
| 140c936 | Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 46a85ea | They appeared to know enough to justify their jobs, and nothing more. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 376523c | Inside a dark pool, no one but the broker who ran it had any idea what was happening. | Michael Lewis | ||
| f6d563d | What do you tell your mother when she asks you where to put her money?" I asked. "Guns and gold," -- | Michael Lewis | ||
| 7f9332b | This gorgeous financial myopia was common in the Valley, and one of the chief sources of its success. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 7e4bd77 | The technologist's tendency to commit all his resources to new technology, | Michael Lewis | ||
| 1b10f6b | Textbooks in economics, which explain the economic purpose of money (a unit of account, a store of value, and a means of exchange), usually neglect to mention the chief role of money in America: a source of entertainment. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 1a56630 | Inside every alienated hacker who thinks he stands for the "good things that ultimately don't matter to most businesses" there is a tycoon struggling to get out." | Michael Lewis | ||
| ee446e9 | And who would deny that the consumer demand for ever more stuff at ever cheaper prices is one of the great deterministic forces in history? | Michael Lewis | ||
| c182441 | Thousands upon thousands of government employees take to the streets to protest the bill. Here is Greece's version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don't really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies. | Michael Lewis |