Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.”

— Michael Lewis

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people – in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts.”

— Michael Lewis

174. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

177. “If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

179. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

182. “Clark liked to say that human beings, when they took risks, fell into one of two types, pigs or chickens. “The difference between these two kinds of people,” he’d say, “is the difference between the pig and the chicken in the ham-and-eggs breakfast. The chicken is interested, the pig is committed. If you are going to do anything worth doing, you need a lot of pigs.” The.”

— Michael Lewis

183. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money.”

— Michael Lewis

190. “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

191. “This was yet another consequence of turning Wall Street partnerships into public corporations: It turned them into objects of speculation. It was no longer the social and economic relevance of a bank that rendered it too big to fail, but the number of side bets that had been made upon it.”

— Michael Lewis

192. “RBC invited Brad along with a bunch of other nonwhite people to a meeting to discuss the issue. Going around the table, people took turns responding to a request to “talk about your experience of being a minority at RBC.” When Brad’s turn came he said, “To be honest, the only time I’ve ever felt like a minority is this exact moment. If you really want to encourage diversity you shouldn’t make people feel like a minority.”

— Michael Lewis

193. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

195. “The Boston Red Sox were obsessed with outcomes; he with process. That’s what kept him sane.”

— Michael Lewis

196. “What was threatening was cold, hard intelligence.”

— Michael Lewis

197. “So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

199. “The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar’s worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident.”

— Michael Lewis

200. “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