After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.

— Michael Lewis

A lot of what people did and said when they "predicted" things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure".

— Michael Lewis

A man got to have a code. - Omar Little

— Michael Lewis

And [Theiler] noticed that when he had his fellow economists to dinner, they filled up on cashews, which meant they had less appetite for the meal. More to the point, he noticed that they tended to be relieved when he removed the cashew nuts, so they didn't ruin their dinners. "The idea that it could make you better off to reduce your choices—that idea was alien to economics.

— Michael Lewis

...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.

— Michael Lewis

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.

— Michael Lewis

Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Crater]

— Michael Lewis

Buy potatoes,” he said. “Gotta hop.” Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them.

— Michael Lewis

Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

— Michael Lewis

Danny explained, “Reforms always create winners and losers, and the losers will always fight harder than the winners.” How did you get the losers to accept change? The prevailing strategy on the Israeli farms – which wasn’t working very well – was to bully or argue with the people who needed to change. The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it, Danny told the students. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced,” he said, “and in the other it is increased.” And that was a sort of proof that there was an advantage in reducing the tensions. “It’s a key idea,” said Danny. “Making it easy to change.

— Michael Lewis