“I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.”

“The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.”

“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.”

“The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.”

“I lived here my whole life and I've never been to this neighborhood.' And Big Mike finally spoke up. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'I got your back.”

“Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”

“What happens when we acknowledge the sovereignty and power of God without trusting in His goodness and faithfulness? A pitcher who saw God's power behind his extremely unlikely rise to the big leagues wondered if, at any difficulty he encountered there, God might be taking his ability away.”