Michael Lewis · 317 pages
Rating: (75.8K votes)
“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“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.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“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.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“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.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“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.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“Years later he would say that when he'd decided to become a professional baseball player, it was the only time he'd done something just for the money, and that he'd never do something just for the money ever again. He would never again let the market dictate the direction of his life.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“If you challenge conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.
Bill James”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money you can’t afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you’re fucked.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“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.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“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, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“It was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, "too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“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.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“For a lot of the players it was their first exposure to the Southern female - the most flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as feminism. Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness!”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“Every form of strength is also a weakness. Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“That’s all right,” says Billy. “We’re blending what we see but we aren’t allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“First base was a far richer social opportunity. First base made catching feeling like a bad dinner party - what with the ump hanging on your shoulder and all the fans and cameras staring at you. At first base you could really talk.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“if you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“The great thing about baseball players, from the point of view of personal hygiene, is how seldom they break a sweat.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“Losing shouldn’t be fun. It’s not fun for me. If I’m going to be miserable, you’re going to be miserable.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“The difference in Billy wasn’t what had happened to him, but what hadn’t. He had a life he hadn’t led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed.”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions. Refusing to draft college players might have been one of them.
Bill James”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
“They end when the career ends,”
― Michael Lewis, quote from Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Michael Lewis
Born place: in New Orleans, Louisiana, The United States
Born date October 15, 1960
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“Now there is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.”
― Irvine Welsh, quote from Trainspotting
“All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”
― Sophocles, quote from Antigone
“What is a woman's place in this modern world? Jasnah Kholin's words read. I rebel against this question, though so many of my peers ask it. The inherent bias in the inquiry seems invisible to so many of them. They consider themselves progressive because they are willing to challenge many of the assumptions of the past.
They ignore the greater assumption--that a 'place' for women must be defined and set forth to begin with. Half of the population must somehow be reduced to the role arrived at by a single conversation. No matter how broad that role is, it will be--by-nature--a reduction from the infinite variety that is womanhood.
I say that there is no role for women--there is, instead, a role for each woman, and she must make it for herself. For some, it will be the role of scholar; for others, it will be the role of wife. For others, it will be both. For yet others, it will be neither.
Do not mistake me in assuming I value one woman's role above another. My point is not to stratify our society--we have done that far to well already--my point is to diversify our discourse.
A woman's strength should not be in her role, whatever she chooses it to be, but in the power to choose that role. It is amazing to me that I even have to make this point, as I see it as the very foundation of our conversation.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Words of Radiance
“He woke one morning tantalized by an idea: if he could catch the orchard trees motionless for one second -- for half of one second -- then none of it would have happened. The kitchen door would bang open and in his father would walk, red-faced and slapping his hands and exclaiming about some newly whelped pup. Childish, Edgar knew, but he didn't care. The trick was to not focus on any single part of any tree, but to look through them all toward a point in the air. But how insidious a bargain he'd made. Even in the quietest moment some small thing quivered and the tableau was destroyed.
How many afternoons slipped away like that? How many midnights standing in the spare room, watching the trees shiver in the moonlight? Still he watched, transfixed. Then, blushing because it was futile and silly, he forced himself to walk away.
When he blinked, an afterimage of perfect stillness.
To think it might happen when he wasn't watching.
He turned back before he reached the door. Through the window glass, a dozen trees strummed by the winter wind, skeletons dancing pair-wise, fingers raised to heaven.
Stop it, he told himself. Just stop.
And watched some more.”
― David Wroblewski, quote from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place.
Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side.
He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work.
Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.”
― Jung Chang, quote from Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
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