Daniel Kahneman

We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision.

The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.

Banks are run by executives, and executives protect themselves, and that does not always mean that banks are going to behave rationally.

Laziness is built deep into our nature.

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

It's very easy for trusted companies to mislead naive customers, and life insurance companies are trusted.

If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It's the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you'll be miserable.

If you're going to be unreligious, it's likely going to be due to reflecting on it and finding some things that are hard to believe.

So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.

Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

People like leaders who look like they are dominant, optimistic, friendly to their friends, and quick on the trigger when it comes to enemies. They like boldness and despise the appearance of timidity and protracted doubt.

Slow thinking has the feeling of something you do. It's deliberate.

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.

If people do not know what is going to make them better off or give them pleasure, then the idea that you can trust people to do what will give them pleasure becomes questionable.

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.