Sonny Rollins
Jazz Musician
"No one is original. Everyone is derivative."
Derivatives quotes
Derivatives
52 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Michael Lewis
Author, Journalist
"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."
Charlie Munger
Investor, Businessman
"To say accounting for derivatives is Americais a sewer is an insult to sewage."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Author, Statistician
"We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?"
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Civil Rights Leader
"It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society."
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"Derivatives are like sex. It's not who we're sleeping with, it's who they're sleeping with that's the problem."
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"Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker."
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"There used to be corporations that produced products. Now there are just banks that produce deals, hedge-fund-driven banks and derivatives and those things."
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"Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology."
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"If AIG had tried to unwind their derivatives books. I don't know. It would have hit every institution in the world."
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"Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy."
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"The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence."
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