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

“It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.”

“Germans longed to be near shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.”

“...[H]uman beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance... Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him... When faced with abundance, the brain's ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress. In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.”

“I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers intomanagers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made amanager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and oftenneurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they goafter each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts thatproducing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers.Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter getmuscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the mostruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street—whySalomon Brothers is getting crunched now—because the ruthless peopleare bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure.”

“I'm not paying you for the player you used to be, I'm paying you for the player you are right now.”

“When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you about the object: it only tells you about the speakers attitude to that object.”