The notion that I might make half a million dollars a year, ten years after I graduated, seemed about as plausible, when I was twenty-one, as the notion that I might fly.

A fool and his money were invited everywhere.

If you were incapable of finding your desk by yourself, you definitely did not need to buy bonds.

When a Wall Street firm helped raise money for a company, it was sprinting; when it traded the company’s stocks and bonds, it was merely jogging.

If a man cannot stand the emptiness of solitude, he will not enjoy the solitude of decision.

By maintaining your dignity, you will annoy your critic more than by defending yourself.

The prospect of earning money in great heaps appealed to me, of course, but I was more scared of exclusion than attracted by profits.

Sometimes there's no alternative to looking like a complete idiot.

Expensive inefficiencies were always the first to go.

If bad news was inevitable, one simply prefers to be the first to suffer from it.

In Wall Street, we are both the living symbols and the victims of runaway finance.

Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street