Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do it twice.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

154. “Meriwether was the King of the Game, the Liar’s Poker champion of the Salomon Brothers’ trading floor. On.”

— Michael Lewis

155. “There was so much confusion about the different terms,” said Charlie. “In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there’s a reason why it doesn’t quite make sense to us. It’s because it doesn’t quite make sense.” The.”

— Michael Lewis

156. “In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.”

— Michael Lewis

157. “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

158. “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

159. “WHEN HE WAS a young man Billy Beane could beat anyone at anything.”

— Michael Lewis

160. “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

161. “My biggest concern is the misuse of science to support policies.”

— Michael Lewis

162. “It’s such a pain in the ass to write a book, I can’t imagine writing one if I’m not interested in the subject.”

— Michael Lewis

163. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

165. “There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t.”

— Michael Lewis

166. “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

167. “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

168. “The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.”

— Michael Lewis

169. “The big fear of the 1980s mortgage bond investor was that he would be repaid too quickly, not that he would fail to be repaid at all. The pool of loans underlying the mortgage bond conformed to the standards, in their size and the credit quality of the borrowers, set by one of several government agencies: Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Ginnie Mae. The loans carried, in effect, government guarantees; if the homeowners defaulted, the government paid off their debts.”

— Michael Lewis

170. “It is far better to keep the enemy close, by bribing him with stock options, than to have him out in the wild, foraging.”

— Michael Lewis

171. “One of the reasons Wall Street had cooked up this new industry called structured finance was that its old-fashioned business was every day less profitable. The profits in stockbroking, along with those in the more conventional sorts of bond broking, had been squashed by Internet competition.”

— Michael Lewis

172. “Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Over.”

— Michael Lewis

173. “Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.”

— Michael Lewis

174. “All good inventions come from something personal,” she said. “People create things because it’s personal.”

— Michael Lewis

175. “The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it:.”

— Michael Lewis

176. “When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off,” he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. “I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off.” Denied.”

— Michael Lewis

177. “The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it “quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.”

— Michael Lewis

178. “There’s a difference between an old-fashioned financial panic and what had happened on Wall Street in 2008. In an old-fashioned panic, perception creates its own reality: Someone shouts “Fire!” in a crowded theater and the audience crushes each other to death in its rush for the exits. On Wall Street in 2008 the reality finally overwhelmed perceptions: A crowded theater burned down with a lot of people still in their seats.”

— Michael Lewis

179. “Mike Burry didn’t own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to “insure”; it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down.”

— Michael Lewis

180. “The best decisions he has made in his life, he said, were completely unexpected, the ones that cut against convention. Then he went even further. He said that every decision he has forced himself to make because it was unexpected has been a good one.”

— Michael Lewis

181. “Making profits on Wall Street is a bit like eating the stuffing from a turkey. Some higher authority must first put the stuffing into the turkey. The turkey was stuffed more generously in the 1980s than ever before.”

— Michael Lewis

182. “National Sarcasm Society: Like We Need Your Support.”

— Michael Lewis

183. “It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria – to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded – without being insane.”

— Michael Lewis

184. “She dropped the matter, and his birthday remained May 28. Armed with the Social Security card, the birth certificate, and the letter from Principal Simpson of the Briarcrest Christian School, they drove the next day to the Department of Motor Vehicles. This time they had Collins in tow. Collins.”

— Michael Lewis

185. “I didn’t think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.”

— Michael Lewis

186. “Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which, upon inspection, proved to be a Washington, DC, propaganda machine funded with millions of dollars from ExxonMobil and Koch Industries. Pyle himself had served as a Koch Industries lobbyist and ran a business on the side writing editorials attacking the DOE’s attempts to reduce the dependence of the American economy on carbon.”

— Michael Lewis

187. “We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.”

— Michael Lewis

188. “The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, writers, musicians, and on and on and on.”

— Michael Lewis

189. “The market might have learned a simple lesson: Don’t make loans to people who can’t repay them. Instead it learned a complicated one: You can keep on making these loans, just don’t keep them on your books. Make the loans, then sell them off to the fixed income departments of big Wall Street investment banks, which will in turn package them into bonds and sell them to investors.”

— Michael Lewis

190. “The reason the Greeks don’t pay taxes is they don’t trust where their taxes are going, because they know these other Greeks are taking money from the state for doing nothing. It’s an essentially corrupt society.”

— Michael Lewis

191. “Baseball – of all things – was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method. As.”

— Michael Lewis

192. “His life was dedicated to the fine art of tearing down and building anew.”

— Michael Lewis

193. “It’s the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most.”

— Michael Lewis

194. “When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,′ Amos liked to say. ‘Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.”

— Michael Lewis

195. “Once, he got himself invited to a meeting with the CEO of Bank of America, Ken Lewis. “I was sitting there listening to him. I had an epiphany. I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, he’s dumb!’ A lightbulb went off. The guy running one of the biggest banks in the world is dumb!”

— Michael Lewis

196. “The only thing capitalism cannot survive is stability. Stability – true stability – is an absence of progress, and a dearth of new wealth.”

— Michael Lewis

197. “There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.”

— Michael Lewis

198. “Moore’s law came with a social corollary: high-tech could not remain high-tech for long.”

— Michael Lewis

199. “Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.”

— Michael Lewis

200. “Best of all, he gave us a rule of thumb about information in the markets that I later found useful: “Those who say don’t know, and those who know don’t say.”

— Michael Lewis