A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they've got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success

I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues - they may know a lot of French however.

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.

I also want to raise the possibility that there are, in the very long term, "virtue effects" in economics- for instance that widespread corrupt accounting will eventually create bad long term consequences as a sort of obverse effect from the virtue-based boost double-entry book-keeping gave to the heyday of Venice. I suggest that when the financial scene starts reminding you of Sodomand Gomorrah, you should fear practical consequences even if you like to participate in what is going on.

Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhibit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke: you have made an enormous commitment to something. You have poured effort and money in. And the more you put in, the more that the whole consistency principle makes you think, "Now it has to work. If I put in just a little more, then it will work."

Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don't need these kinds of innovation in finance. It's OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets.