3 Quotes by Diana B. Henriques

In a world full of lies, the most dangerous ones are those we tell ourselves.

What went wrong was their rejection of basic bedrock principles of investing – that high returns are leg-shackled to high risks; that you should never put all your eggs in one basket; that you should never invest in something you cannot understand. They failed to see that no one should hand all their money over to anyone simply because they trust him, or because someone they admire trusts him.

Madoff was not inhumanly monstrous. He was monstrously human. He was greedy for money and praise, arrogantly sure of his own capacity to pull it off, smugly dismissive of skeptics – just like anyone who mortgaged the house to invest in tech stocks, or tapped the off-limits college fund to gamble on a new business, or put all the retirement savings into a hedge fund they didn’t understand, or cheated a little on the tax return or the expense account or the spouse.