Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There’s something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.”

— Michael Lewis

2. “Those who know don’t tell and those who tell don’t know.”

— Michael Lewis

3. “The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”

— Michael Lewis

4. “Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.”

— Michael Lewis

5. “Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck – and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.”

— Michael Lewis

6. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. – Sun-tzu.”

— Michael Lewis

7. “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

— Michael Lewis

8. “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

— Michael Lewis

9. “A man got to have a code. – Omar Little.”

— Michael Lewis

10. “Don’t be deceived by life’s outcomes. Life’s outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them.”

— Michael Lewis

11. “In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.”

— Michael Lewis

12. “Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

14. “When the last history of high-frequency trading is written, Hunsader, like Joe Saluzzi and Sal Arnuk of Themis Trading, deserves a prominent place in it.”

— Michael Lewis

15. “Success was his chosen form of revenge.”

— Michael Lewis

16. “As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.”

— Michael Lewis

17. “Commitment, by its nature, frees us from ourselves and, while it stands us in opposition to some, it joins us with others similarly committed. Commitment moves us from the mirror trap of the self absorbed with the self to the freedom of a community of shared values.”

— Michael Lewis

18. “By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.”

— Michael Lewis

19. “He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. “It was like reading the owner’s manual of the human mind,” he later recalled. “Not the usual owner’s manual, but an owner’s manual that pointed out all the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of how we.”

— Michael Lewis

20. “I procrastinate to a point where I’m filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It’s usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.”

— Michael Lewis

21. “Wall Street investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: They set the odds. The customer who plays zero-sum games against them may win from time to time but never systematically, and never so spectacularly that he bankrupts the casino.”

— Michael Lewis

22. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

23. “We change for the good so long as good exists around us.”

— Michael Lewis

24. “How many people can pick up a book and find an instruction manual for their life?”

— Michael Lewis

25. “He concluded that there was effectively no way for an accountant assigned to audit a giant Wall Street firm to figure out whether it was making money or losing money.”

— Michael Lewis

26. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

27. “You want loyalty, hire a cocker spaniel.”

— Michael Lewis

28. “He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.”

— Michael Lewis

29. “What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions – if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they’re still all wrong.”

— Michael Lewis

30. “The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population.”

— Michael Lewis

31. “Valerie Feigen watched in near bewilderment as her husband acquired, haltingly, in fits and starts, a trait resembling tact.”

— Michael Lewis

32. “There’s no point in arguing with partisan supporters. Their views are their identity. Nothing you can tell the most phlegmatic follower.”

— Michael Lewis

33. “The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.”

— Michael Lewis

34. “Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know,” said.”

— Michael Lewis

35. “A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.”

— Michael Lewis

36. “The problem wasn’t that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail. The problem was that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to succeed.”

— Michael Lewis

37. “What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,” he said, “was what not to do: beat up a kid. It’s easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.”

— Michael Lewis

38. “No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo.”

— Michael Lewis

39. “The smart person accepts. The idiot insists.”

— Michael Lewis

40. “You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire.”

— Michael Lewis

41. “Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.”

— Michael Lewis

42. “One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.”

— Michael Lewis

43. “If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.”

— Michael Lewis

44. “And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside.”

— Michael Lewis

45. “It’s one thing to bet on red or black and know that you are betting on red or black. It’s another to bet on a form of red and not to know it.”

— Michael Lewis

46. “The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.” “I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that,” recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. “And he would say, ‘No. You don’t.’ And I thought: lucky man!”

— Michael Lewis

47. “Wing Chau didn’t know he’d been handpicked by Greg Lippmann to persuade Steve Eisman that the people on the other end of his credit default swaps were either crooks or morons, but he played the role anyway.”

— Michael Lewis

48. “Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.”

— Michael Lewis

49. “Those who say don’t know, and those who know don’t say.”

— Michael Lewis

50. “It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.”

— Michael Lewis