Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

203. “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

204. “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

205. “The financial markets paid a lot of people extremely well for narrow expertise and a few people, poorly, for the big, global views you needed to have if you were to allocate capital across markets.”

— Michael Lewis

206. “The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.”

— Michael Lewis

207. “The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A.”

— Michael Lewis

208. “These people believed that the collapse of the subprime mortgage market was unlikely precisely because it would be such a catastrophe. Nothing so terrible could ever actually happen. The.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

210. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

212. “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

213. “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

214. “Meriwether spent his entire day avoiding dumb bets, and he wasn’t about to accept this one.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

216. “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?”

— Michael Lewis

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

220. “Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it.”

— Michael Lewis

221. “My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.”

— Michael Lewis

222. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

223. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

225. “Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.”

— Michael Lewis

226. “Back in 1996, 65 percent of subprime loans had been fixed-rate, meaning that typical subprime borrowers might be getting screwed, but at least they knew for sure how much they owed each month until they paid off the loan. By 2005, 75 percent of subprime loans were some form of floating-rate, usually fixed for the first two years.”

— Michael Lewis

227. “The ability of Wall Street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.”

— Michael Lewis

228. “The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can’t go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.”

— Michael Lewis

229. “Talking to a programmer type about the trading business was a bit like talking to the house plumber at work in the basement about the card game the Mafia don was running upstairs.”

— Michael Lewis

230. “He had little patience for the mystical, spiritual approach of computer programming.”

— Michael Lewis

231. “If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date.”

— Michael Lewis

232. “With stagnant wages and booming consumption, the cash-strapped American masses had a virtually unlimited demand for loans but an uncertain ability to repay them.”

— Michael Lewis

233. “The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had from turning an investment bank into a public corporation and leveraging its balance sheet with exotic risks, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted, from trust to blind faith.”

— Michael Lewis

234. “The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction.”

— Michael Lewis

235. “Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself.”

— Michael Lewis

236. “I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,′ Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by ‘Value Theory.’ ‘A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts ‘irrational behavior’ if the behavior in question is in fact observed.”

— Michael Lewis

237. “It’s Groundhog Day,” said Max. “The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say, ‘This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I’ve ever worked with.’ This happens over and over and over.”

— Michael Lewis

238. “When asked the key to his success, he said, “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”

— Michael Lewis

239. “The rapacity of companies with monopolistic power, and their ability to have their way with the government, got her thinking about the big American systems.”

— Michael Lewis

240. “The subprime mortgage market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified.”

— Michael Lewis

241. “The vicious cycle that is bringing down European states is not going to hit USA, at least not for a while, at the level of the federal government. The same cannot be said of state and local governments.”

— Michael Lewis

242. “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

243. “There is nothing more satisfying to me,” he said, “than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it.”

— Michael Lewis

244. “The way the creative process works is that you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.”

— Michael Lewis

245. “They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes – whether it turned out to be right or wrong – but by the process that led to it. The job of the decision maker wasn’t to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.”

— Michael Lewis

246. “A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn’t really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term.”

— Michael Lewis

247. “In 2008 it was the entire financial system that was at risk. We were still short. But you don’t want the system to crash. It’s sort of like the flood’s about to happen and you’re Noah. You’re on the ark. Yeah, you’re okay. But you are not happy looking out at the flood. That’s not a happy moment for Noah.” By.”

— Michael Lewis

248. “The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished. All that was clear was that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.”

— Michael Lewis

249. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

250. “Investing well was all about being paid the right price for risk.”

— Michael Lewis