“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient," Said Palmer. " The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, writers, musicians, and on and on and on.”

“People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.”

“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.”