Quotes from The Money Game by Adam Smith

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The following are a few of my favorite quotes from The Money Game by Adam Smith.

• If you really know what's going on, you don't even have to know what's going on to know what's going on.
• Enantiodromia is the tendency of men to swing to their opposites.
• Keynes said that there is nothing so disasterous as a rational policy in an irrational world.
• Samuel Johnson - "No man is so harmlessly occupied as when he is making money."
• Norman Brown - "The dynamic of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future."
• The strongest emotions in the market are greed and fear.
• Money, contrary to popular myth, does help people more than it spoils them, simply because it opens up more options.
• Repeated shocks will give you anxiety, and anxiety is the enemy of identity, and without identity there is no serenity.

What is it the good managers have? It's a kind of locked-in concentration, an intuition, a feel, nothing that can be schooled. The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer...

A man is really at his best, his most fulfilled, when he's on the way to becoming what he's going to become... With the good men, you can see the learning juices churning around every mistake. You learn from mistakes. When I look back, my life seems to be an endless series of mistakes.