Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

204. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

206. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

209. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

211. “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

212. “They hired a PhD student from the statistics department at the University of California at Berkeley to help them, but he quit after they asked him to study the market for pork belly futures. “It turned out that he was a vegetarian,” said Jamie. “He had a problem with capitalism in general, but the pork bellies pushed him over the edge.”

— Michael Lewis

213. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.”

— Michael Lewis

226. “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

227. “He still had the Dutch habit of laughing at whatever you told him, just in case it happened to be a joke.”

— Michael Lewis

228. “The Irish turned in on themselves and bid up their own land prices in the most extraordinary ways. The Irish people stepped in and guaranteed the banks, and committed to repay sums they can’t afford to repay, and essentially committed themselves to generations of suffering.”

— Michael Lewis

229. “It was a measure of how much money people were making in the bond market that the magazine Institutional Investor was about to create a hot list of people who worked in it, called The 20 Rising Stars of Fixed Income. It was a measure of how much money people.”

— Michael Lewis

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “I hated discussing ideas with investors,” he said, “because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process.” Once you became an idea’s defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it.”

— Michael Lewis

247. “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

248. “How about you keep the tens of millions you nearly prevented me from earning for you last year and we call it even?”

— Michael Lewis

249. “The presence of millions of small investors had politicized the stock market. It had been legislated and regulated to at least seem fair.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis