Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

183. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

192. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

194. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

196. “When something becomes obvious to you,” he said, “you immediately think surely someone else is doing this.”

— Michael Lewis

197. “After the war Avi, by then twenty-two years old, finally decided what he would study: psychology. Had you asked him just then why he picked psychology, “I would say I want to understand the human soul. Not the mind. The soul.”

— Michael Lewis

198. “The purpose was to extend credit to less and less creditworthy homeowners, not so that they might buy a house but so that they could cash out whatever equity they had in the house they already owned.”

— Michael Lewis

199. “Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half.”

— Michael Lewis

200. “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