Atheists From The United States

"The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less."

"All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise."

"The fuses had been lit and could not be extinguished. All that remained was to observe the speed of the spark, and the size of the explosions."

"Spain and France had accumulated debts of more than ten times their annual revenues. Historically, such levels of government indebtedness had led to government default. “Here’s the only way I think things can work out for these countries,” Bass said. “If they start running real budget surpluses. Yeah, and that will happen right after monkeys fly out of your ass.”"

"The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people who didn't use it."

"He walked around the Las Vegas casino incredulous at the spectacle before him: seven thousand people, all of whom seem delighted with the world as they found it. A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen. How could this be?"

"Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets."

"Each firm held its rope; one by one, they realized that no matter how strongly they pulled, the balloon would eventually lift them off their feet."

"Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them-to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch."

"Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?"

"Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly."

"Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions."

"The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold."

"The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident."

"The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so."

"Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it."

"A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans."

"These guys lied to infinity. What I learned from that experience was that Wall Street didn't give a shit what it sold."

"I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created."

"A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term."

"Ever since grade school, when his father had shown him the stock tables at the back of the newspaper and told him that the stock market was a crooked place and never to be trusted, let alone invested in, the subject had fascinated him."

"I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me me as totally preposterous-which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from."

"the more he studied Buffet, the less he thought he could be copied; indeed, the lesson of Buffet was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual."

"The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers."

""You've gotta respect everyone’s beliefs." No, you don't. That's what gets us in trouble. Look, you have to acknowledge everyone's beliefs, and then you have to reserve the right to go: "That is fuckin' stupid. Are you kiddin' me?" I acknowledge that you believe that, that's great, but I'm not gonna respect it. I have an uncle that believes he saw Sasquatch. We do not believe him nor do we respect him!"

"When I was 25, all I did was just scream, "Sellout! Fucking sellouts. Corporate sellout. Industry bullshit. Meh-meh-meh." I look back on it and I realized, "oh, I was screaming 'sellout' because nobody wanted to buy what I was selling.""

"The night we elected Obama, CNN had holograms. They had fuckin' holograms. We have Star Wars technology now. What if that means Barack is gonna to be the miracle he seems to be? What if this really is the dawning of an amazing age? He gets in there, fixes the economy, gets us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We've got Osama bin Laden and George Bush in dunking booths filled with urine. You can just throw apples at em all day. And then what if he starts slinging amazing future technology on us. You know suddenly we get hover boots and teleportation pills and there's floating cars everywhere. At that point, would there be like two remaining holdout racists left? Like the last two guys down in Arkansas, in their hover boots? Just going, "Yeah, there's that nigger that gave us anti-gravity. I'm gonna be late to the cross burning. My free government blowjob robot broke. Fuckin' bullshit. This guy's the worst president ever. Just like a black guy to give you a blowjob robot for free and it breaks after 6 years. This sucks.""

"I didn't realize how bad my outlook on life is until I went on a press tour for Ratatouille and had to talk to children's magazines and children's TV shows. And I wasn't interviewed by adults; I was interviewed by actual smiling children. And I didn't realize until that point how desperately I depend on negativity and cynicism just to communicate with the outside world. It's pathetic. The Oswalt family crest should just be a pair of eyes rolling off to the side, a bag of Cheetos, and then the word "fuck." That would be our shield that you'd see retreating from the great battles of history. "Fuck this. Bows and arrows? Nobody told me anything about bows and arrows. Goodbye.""

"I'm an atheist and I love religion. And I don't love religion in a snarky mean-spirited way; I unabashedly, sincerely love that we have religion because if we didn't, we wouldn't be here right now; being all postmodern and ironic. There'd be no civilization. If no one invented religion, we'd be fucked right now. Because at the dawn of man, civilization was the biggest and the strongest... and that's as far as we're gonna go. It was whoever was the biggest fucked, killed, ate anything they wanted. That was it! Civilization was a huge psychopath with a club goin', "I'm gonna have rape for dinner." That was it! That's as far as we were gonna go. And then one of my ancestors, some weakling, said, "Look there's no way I can beat that guy, but what if I trick him into thinking that if he doesn't kill and rape people while he's down here, when he dies there's a magic city in the clouds and he can go up and have all the cake he wants?" Now that's not a very well formed plan but he went and told the big psycho. And the psycho heard that and said, "Uhh, I like cake." "BOOM! There you go! That was the beginning of civilization. Now we can work on fire and writing and agriculture. That's religion. It's the ol' sky cake dodge; it worked! And by the way, things were great for a while. But then, what was happening then was that shit was going on all over the planet. They would just use different deserts. They would tell them about sky cookies, or sky pie, or sky baklava. So as each of these civilizations grew, they built ships; they'd go visit each other, and the one guy would walk off the boat and go, "Hey, did you hear the good news about the sky baklava?" and the first guy went, "It's CAKE, motherfucker! You're dead!"..."

"In the middle of Tom Cruise's speech, there's this sudden, dramatic pull-in to his face, and there's tears in his eyes, and he says, "we live in a cynical world," and that's when my brother went, "FUCK YOU!" at the top of his... oh, my God. That was... it was such a horrible, rude thing to yell, and I was laughing so hard. I could not get the air in to make the sound of laughter. People ask me, "what is your favorite comedy of all time?" Jerry Maguire, when my brother yells, "fuck you!" at Tom Cruise. It is a 90-minute setup to one punchline. It's like not jerking off for ten years, and then painting the garage! Oh, my God, I'm seeing dead kings!"

"[on KFC's Famous Bowls] I just want kind of a light brown hillock of glop. If you could put my lunch in a blender, and liquefy it, and then put it into a caulking gun and inject it right into my femoral artery, even better! But until you invent a lunch gun, I would like a failure pile in a sadness bowl!"

"Hey Patton, looks like Paris Hilton's writing a book. And I go, "She's a cunt who should die of AIDS." They go, (nervously) "Ah ha ha, okay! Hey! All right... um, okay, follow-up question. She's also coming out with a line of handbags," "As long as she gets AIDS, that's fine with me, man. If she could get cancer of the AIDS of the leukemia of the eyes, that'd be awesome. If like, a biker could fuck that into her skull...""

"If another one of my Whole-Foods friends says my wife should have a home birth, I am going to punch all the soy on the planet."

"[on Barack Obama's election] Do you realize for the next four years America is gonna be a cool eighties cop flick? "Barack, get your ass in my office now! Did you balance the budget again?!" "Yeah, it was just sitting there, chief..." "You wrecked twenty cars! Senate's gonna have my ass for this." "Eh, whatever, chief." And he rides away in a Camaro on two wheels."

"They had a class at my college called "Physics for Poets!" Hey there, theater fags and English queers! Put on some pantaloons and a scarf and take a bracing shot of absinthe and skip on down through a field of gilly-flowers to the Physics department, where we'll teach you about the music of the spheres! Without using any scaaary numbers! And you can ask questions like, "Is the red planet Mercury like the crimson eye of Cerberus?" Whatever, D'Artagnan, sit the fuck down. Let's just get you through this."

"I was thinking the other day about a time machine... and the first thing I thought of doing if I actually had a time machine, is that I would go back in time to about 1993 or '94, and kill George Lucas with a shovel."

"If the standard for being impeached is "getting a blowjob" or "covering up a burglary", then shouldn't Bush have been executed by now?"

"I don't give a shit where the stuff I love comes from! I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE! Hey, do you like Angelina Jolie? Does she give you a big boner? Well, here's Jon Voight's ball sack!"

"If they've really caught the #GoldenStateKiller, I hope I get to visit him. Not to gloat or gawk — to ask him the questions that @TrueCrimeDiary wanted answered in her “Letter To An Old Man” at the end of #IllBeGoneInTheDark."

"...I send money to NPR [National Public Radio], I support them, I support them philosophically. But, it's UN-LISTENABLE RADIO! You understand me? I send them money, so I don't have to listen to them. When, when did conservatives steal rock and roll from us? When did that happen? All the AM stations, nothing but racist fascist douchebags, all their break music is this blasty-ass, gut-bucket rock and roll. Bill O'Reilly will play the White Stripes, for God's sakes! Then you turn it over to NPR and their break music is a sad, lonely saxophone echoing through a sewer pipe somewhere. When did that happen? So you turn it on, [imitates AM radio announcer] "Next on Bill O'Reilly, why black people smell different!" [imitates hard rock electric guitar]. [imitates NPR announcer] "Later on NPR, we'll talk to a woman who makes macrame belts out of old typewriter ribbons." [imitates sad lonely saxophone echoing through a sewer pipe]. Play some Zepplin, for God's sake. "It's our pledge drive here on NPR, and we have a 20-minute field recording of a tumluku which is a Bosnian instrument which can only be played when you have a pierced scrotum and three kids who have been killed by a land mine." [imitates tumluku]. "The Tybeshian practice of scream-singing rightfully died out in the 4th Century B.C., but two Berkeley trust fund students have revived it and here is a 40 minute sample." [screams incoherently]."

"I love the fact that I grew up in Sterling, I really do. Because when you're growing up in a nondescript, soulless, boring town, you've been given a present from God. And the present is: The Test of the Small Town. And you pass that test when you go, "I'm leaving before I kill everyone and then myself." That's when you pass. You have passed. You fail when you go, "I'll get a job at the Citgo and fill my truck up for free!" Oops, you fucked up. And the person who administers your test, year after year, until you can't take it any more until you can't take it and you leave, is the movie critic on the local news. That's the guy whose job it is to keep everything relevant and cool and important away from you. You have to get off your ass and go find it on your own initiative."

"Every time I'm on a TV show, and I have a [sexually explicit] line, they never say, "Don't say that! At all!" Because I wouldn't; I know you're not supposed to say that. Instead they say: "Can you find a cute, G-rated way to say that?" Okay. Cleaned-up, G-rated filth is way creepier than straight-up filth. Which is creepier: "I wanna shove my hard cock in your wet pussy" or "I'm gonna fill your hoo-hah with goof juice!" That line right there is completely G-rated. You can say that on TV. And that's fuckin' horrifying. ...Try saying that in bed, "I'm gonna fill your hoo-hah with goof juice," and prepare for the winter-y freshness of Mace."

"In this age of cynicism, bipartisanship and personal cowardice, it's refreshing to find a group of people willing to die for what they believe."

"The angry "@" tweets from my hammer toed followers opened my eyes. "Pedo-phobe" shaming hurts us all. I am a PROUD pedophile!"

"My dong is super-friendly and loves getting rubbed by children. #CareerEndingTwitterTypos"

"Interviewer: Tell me about some chicks you fucked on the road. El Duce: Well, we pick 'em up...and drop 'em off at Jack in the Box. Truck stops are the goods... you get an airhead at a truck stop and you say 'bitch, you gotta get down on the dick! Cunt!'"

"El Duce: You know I believe in peaceful rape. You know when the broad passes out... drugs... that's... I see the green light go on. It's time to make whoopy, baby, yeah!"

"Wally George: Tell me what is your band all about? I mean what is The Mentors all about? El Duce: Well, I'll tell you son. It's like this, boy. We're heterosexuals. We wanna create more heterosexual music for the rest of the world. We're tired of sissie groups like Mötley Crüe and all this sissy stuff. We want rape rock!"

"Interviewer: Do you guys really live the lifestyle that you sing about in your songs? El Duce: Absolutely. All our songs are about reality. Like Sleep Bandits."

"Wally George: How do you describe your music? El Duce: Well, it's rape rock."