Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “Ignorance allows people to disregard the consequences of their actions. And sometimes it leads to consequences even they did not intend.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

109. “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

110. “There are several insights at the heart of the A’s system that I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it’s a team game. That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to your team, so for god’s sake don’t go blow a quarter of your budget on one guy.”

— Michael Lewis

111. “He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.”

— Michael Lewis

112. “The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.”

— Michael Lewis

113. “Courage is a muscle memory. The tallest oak in the forest was once just a little nut that held its ground.”

— Michael Lewis

114. “Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.”

— Michael Lewis

115. “We have the Google family calendar. Before a week starts, my wife and I sit down to decide who’s driving who to school or when can we go out on a date.”

— Michael Lewis

116. “The trouble, Danny suspected, was that “the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don’t communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real – that they are just something on somebody’s mind.”

— Michael Lewis

117. “People who want very badly to win, and to be seen to have won, enjoy a tactical advantage over people who don’t. That very desire, tantamount to a need, is also a weakness. In Billy Beane, the trait is so pronounced that it is not merely a weakness. It is a curse.”

— Michael Lewis

118. “That’s what happens when you’re thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.”

— Michael Lewis

119. “Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it’s still being made all over the place, all the time.”

— Michael Lewis

120. “My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.”

— Michael Lewis

121. “When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.”

— Michael Lewis

122. “Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be.”

— Michael Lewis

123. “Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification. Amos’s.”

— Michael Lewis

124. “The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a ‘collective good’ sense.”

— Michael Lewis

125. “When banking stops, credit stops, and when credit stops, trade stops, and when trade stops – well, the city of Chicago had only eight days of chlorine on hand for its water supply. Hospitals ran out of medicine. The entire modern world was premised on the ability to buy now and pay later.”

— Michael Lewis

126. “There is another way to think of John MacWilliams’s fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. “Program management” is not just program management. “Program management” is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk.”

— Michael Lewis

127. “You know what gets me excited about a guy? I get excited about a guy when he has something about him that causes everyone else to overlook him and I know that it is something that just doesn’t matter.” When.”

— Michael Lewis

128. “We fought with those cocksuckers all the way down,” says one Deutsche Bank trader. And, all the way down, the debt collectors at Deutsche Bank sensed the bond traders at Morgan Stanley misunderstood their own trade. They weren’t lying; they genuinely failed to understand the nature of the subprime CDO.”

— Michael Lewis

129. “Don’t worry. You gave him the right answer.” Actually, Michael was after something more important than the fate of his Briarcrest teammate. “I wanted to see what type of person he was,” he said later. “If he’s pulling scholarships that they’d promised kids, would you want to play for that kind of person? Be around that kind of person?” Coach O wasn’t that kind of person, he decided; more interestingly, Coach.”

— Michael Lewis

130. “If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.”

— Michael Lewis

131. “That was Eisman’s logic: the logic of Wall Street’s pecking order. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in this neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned the least pleasant roles, just happy to be a part of things. The game, as Eisman saw it, was crack the whip. He assumed Merrill Lynch had taken its assigned place at the end of the chain. On.”

— Michael Lewis

132. “Donnie Green himself had been a trader at Salomon Brothers in the dark ages, when traders had more hair on their chests than on their heads.”

— Michael Lewis

133. “Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven’t really earned.”

— Michael Lewis

134. “Jamie Mai was tall and strikingly handsome and so, almost by definition, had the air of a man in charge – until he opened his mouth and betrayed his lack of confidence in everything from tomorrow’s sunrise to the future of the human race.”

— Michael Lewis

135. “By May 2007, however, there was a growing dispute between Howie Hubler and Morgan Stanley. Amazingly, it had nothing to do with the wisdom of owning $16 billion in complex securities whose value ultimately turned on the ability of a Las Vegas stripper with five investment properties, or a Mexican strawberry picker with a single $750,000 home, to make rapidly rising interest payments.”

— Michael Lewis

136. “There is another way to think of John MacWilliams’s fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.”

— Michael Lewis

137. “Goldman Sachs did not leave the house before it began to burn; it was merely the first to dash through the exit – and then it closed the door behind it.”

— Michael Lewis

138. “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. – Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise.”

— Michael Lewis

139. “If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer’s pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa.”

— Michael Lewis

140. “When an American declares bankruptcy, when he hits bottom, he can reinvent himself. There’s a story he can tell. We tolerate reinvention. We encourage reinvention. That’s what this country has that Europe does not. It’s not just a crisis; it’s an opportunity.”

— Michael Lewis

141. “I have a job to do. Make money for my clients. Period. But boy it gets morbid when you start making investments that work out extra great if a tragedy occurs.”

— Michael Lewis

142. “When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present. It isn’t the actual future so much as some grotesque silicone version of it. Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven’t really earned.”

— Michael Lewis

143. “At the top of Charlie Ledley’s list of concerns, after Cornwall Capital had laid its bets against subprime loans, was that the powers that be might step in at any time to prevent individual American subprime mortgage borrowers from failing. The powers that be never did that, of course. Instead they stepped in to prevent the failure of the big Wall Street firms that had contrived to bankrupt themselves by making a lot of dumb bets on subprime borrowers. After.”

— Michael Lewis

144. “How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation? He tried, but his English in-laws just looked at him strangely. They understood that someone else had just lost a great deal of money and Ben had just made a great deal of money, but never got much past that. “I can’t really talk to them about it,” he says. “They’re English.”

— Michael Lewis

145. “For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn’t, someone else would.”

— Michael Lewis

146. “You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That’s when you need to stop and check your thinking... Beware of the delirious guy in the emergency unit with the long history of alcoholism, because you will say, ‘He’s just drunk,’ and you’ll miss the subdural hematoma.”

— Michael Lewis

147. “Knowledge is literally prediction,” said Morey. “Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally everything you do you’re trying to predict the right thing. Most people just do it subconsciously.” A.”

— Michael Lewis

148. “He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

— Michael Lewis

149. “Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation. – Warren Buffett.”

— Michael Lewis

150. “Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it.”

— Michael Lewis