Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 9

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

— Michael Lewis

52. “Icelandic people are inbred. And they have a sense of themselves as genetically special, and a history of risk-taking because they make their living on the high seas fishing. Assets generally rose in value during this period, and so it looked like they actually knew what they were doing.”

— Michael Lewis

53. “It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Amos said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”

— Michael Lewis

54. “To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.”

— Michael Lewis

55. “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

56. “He was the person for whom the clock was always running out, the game was always tied, and the ball was always in his hands.”

— Michael Lewis

57. “Greg Lippmann was now blasting Vinny and Danny with all sorts of negative information about the housing market, and, for the first time, Vinny and Danny began to hide the information from Eisman. “We were worried he’d come out of his office and shout, ‘Do a trillion!’” said Danny. In.”

— Michael Lewis

58. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

59. “That’s all right,” says Billy. “We’re blending what we see but we aren’t allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see.”

— Michael Lewis

60. “It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight,” he wrote. “There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble’s inflation.”

— Michael Lewis

61. “Time is a variable continuum.”

— Michael Lewis

62. “Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: They had been forced to learn to program computers without the luxury of endless computer time. Many years later, when he had plenty of computer time, Serge still wrote out new programs on paper before typing them into the machine. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he said. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work.”

— Michael Lewis

63. “Psychologists have long known that people see patterns where none exist.”

— Michael Lewis

64. “Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.”

— Michael Lewis

65. “He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”

— Michael Lewis

66. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

67. “To Danny and Vinny, Greg Lippmann was a walking embodiment of the bond market, which is to say he was put on earth to screw the customer.”

— Michael Lewis

68. “Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.”

— Michael Lewis

69. “People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press – no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is right.”

— Michael Lewis

70. “When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That.”

— Michael Lewis

71. “Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.”

— Michael Lewis

72. “The game has some of the feel of trading, just as jousting has some of the feel of war.”

— Michael Lewis

73. “After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one’s perception of another, in relation to everyone else?”

— Michael Lewis

74. “There’s a certain status to suffering in Ireland, that the person who – if you’re sitting around a table, the person with the greatest status is the person who had the most horrible thing happen to them most recently.”

— Michael Lewis

75. “What happens when we acknowledge the sovereignty and power of God without trusting in His goodness and faithfulness? A pitcher who saw God’s power behind his extremely unlikely rise to the big leagues wondered if, at any difficulty he encountered there, God might be taking his ability away.”

— Michael Lewis

76. “The game had a powerful meaning for traders. People like John Meriwether believed that Liar’s Poker had a lot in common with bond trading. It tested a trader’s character. It honed a trader’s instincts. A good player made a good trader, and vice versa. We all understood it. The.”

— Michael Lewis

77. “The old scouts are like a Greek chorus; it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball. The eternal themes are precisely what Billy Beane wants to exploit for profit – by ignoring them.”

— Michael Lewis

78. “It’s taboo,” he said. “When they ask you why you want to be an investment banker, you’re supposed to talk about the challenges, and the thrill of doing deals, and the excitement of working with such high-calibre people, but never, ever mention money.”

— Michael Lewis

79. “Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”

— Michael Lewis

80. “Liquidity. When an executive said his bank had plenty of liquidity it always meant that it didn’t. At.”

— Michael Lewis

81. “Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.”

— Michael Lewis

82. “Because metaphors are vivid and memorable, and because they are not readily subjected to critical analysis, they can have considerable impact on human judgment even when they are inappropriate, useless, or misleading,” said Amos. “They replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.”

— Michael Lewis

83. “The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became – though even to use words like “corrupt” and “sinister” made serious people uncomfortable, and so Brad avoided them.”

— Michael Lewis

84. “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him. – Leo Tolstoy, 1897.”

— Michael Lewis

85. “The Moulin Rouge is, like the West Village and the Nasdaq, one of those places that people who don’t like to take risks come to for the thrill of being on the spot where risks once were taken.”

— Michael Lewis

86. “That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.”

— Michael Lewis

87. “It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in pointing out that it was broken.”

— Michael Lewis

88. “A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins’ linemen put it, “No human being should be six four, two forty-five, and run a four-five forty.”

— Michael Lewis

89. “Walking through the ruins, she saw all over again what she had seen so many times: how much better Americans were at responding to a disaster than preventing it.”

— Michael Lewis

90. “Burry did not think investing could be reduced to a formula or learned from any one role model. The more he studied Buffett, the less he thought Buffett could be copied; indeed, the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual. “If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are,” Burry said. “At one point I recognized.”

— Michael Lewis

91. “He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.”

— Michael Lewis

92. “The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him. It’s what most people know as a “flea-flicker,” but the Redskins call it a “throw back special.” Two Mississippi: Theismann searches for a receiver but instead sees Harry Carson coming.”

— Michael Lewis

93. “This was tricky. They had, right now, at home, boxes of letters addressed to Michael from college football coaches and boosters and just people who wanted to get to know the future star. They had a personal letter from Congressman Harold Ford Jr., who seemed to want to become Michael’s friend, and a stack of letters from a football coach at the University of Alabama, who seemed prepared to offer his hand in marriage.”

— Michael Lewis

94. “The first day after the merger, Brad got a call from a worried female employee, who whispered, “There is a guy in here with suspenders walking around with a baseball bat in his hands, taking swings.” That turned out to be Carlin’s CEO, Jeremy Frommer, who, whatever else he was, was not RBC nice. One of Frommer’s signature poses was feet up on his desk, baseball bat swinging wildly over his head while some poor shoeshine guy tried to polish his shoes.”

— Michael Lewis

95. “I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else’s boat or you’ll regret in in the morning.”

— Michael Lewis

96. “The incentives are still rotten, and people are still paid to do things they shouldn’t be doing. The reforms did not really address the incentives, the system is still dysfunctional and there are still behavioural issues that need to be addressed.”

— Michael Lewis

97. “Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening,” he said. A scout would settle on an opinion about a player and then arrange the evidence to support that opinion. “The.”

— Michael Lewis

98. “Vinny, always darker, said, “There were more morons than crooks, but the crooks were higher up”.”

— Michael Lewis

99. “The power of an imagination can arise from what it refuses to foresee.”

— Michael Lewis

100. “Isocrates: “Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.”

— Michael Lewis