Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions.”

— Michael Lewis

104. “The guy walks around with a banana in his ear. And people are like, ‘Why do you have a banana in your ear?’ He says, ‘To keep the alligators away! There are no alligators! See?”

— Michael Lewis

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn’t it be nice if they looked in the mirror?”

— Michael Lewis

109. “First base was a far richer social opportunity. First base made catching feeling like a bad dinner party – what with the ump hanging on your shoulder and all the fans and cameras staring at you. At first base you could really talk.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”

— Michael Lewis

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

129. “People with Asperger’s couldn’t control what they were interested in. It was a stroke of luck that his special interest was financial markets and not, say, collecting lawn mower catalogues.”

— Michael Lewis

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

141. “You can keep mistakes from happening if you can identify the almost mistakes. This kind of changes how I view everything.”

— Michael Lewis

142. “I’m now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone without breaking the law is to call someone he doesn’t know and try to sell that person something he doesn’t want.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

144. “He was like some tragic figure in Greek mythology whose offenses against the gods had caused them to design for him this exquisite torture: you must desperately need to see what you cannot bear to see.”

— Michael Lewis

145. “His attitude to the clutter of daily life was of a piece with his strategy for dealing with social demands. Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away, he said. Everything that didn’t seem to Amos obviously important he chucked, and thus what he saved acquired the interest of objects that have survived a pitiless culling.”

— Michael Lewis

146. “One of the oldest adages in investing is that if you’re reading about it in the paper, it’s too late,” he.”

— Michael Lewis

147. “Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.”

— Michael Lewis

148. “To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The entire profession had arranged itself as if to confirm the wisdom of its decisions.”

— Michael Lewis

149. “The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.”

— Michael Lewis

150. “I also immediately internalized the idea that no school could teach someone how to be a great investor. If it were true, it’d be the most popular school in the world, with an impossibly high tuition. So it must not be true.” Investing.”

— Michael Lewis