Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Each firm held its rope; one by one, they realized that no matter how strongly they pulled, the balloon would eventually lift them off their feet.”

— Michael Lewis

252. “Danny should have been elated: Everything they had thought might happen was now happening. He wasn’t elated, however; he was anxious. At 10:30, an hour into trading, every financial stock went into a free fall, whether it deserved to or not. “All this information goes through me,” he said. “I’m supposed to know how to transmit information. Prices were moving so quickly I couldn’t get a fix. It felt like a black hole. The abyss.” It.”

— Michael Lewis

253. “The main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders.”

— Michael Lewis

254. “The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It’s hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.”

— Michael Lewis

255. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

257. “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

258. “Steve’s fun to take to any Wall Street meeting,” said Vinny. “Because he’ll say ‘explain that to me’ thirty different times. Or ‘could you explain that more, in English?’ Because once you do that, there’s a few things you learn. For a start, you figure out if they even know what they’re talking about. And a lot of times they don’t!”

— Michael Lewis

259. “Danny’s trading life was man versus man, but this felt more like man versus nature: The synthetic CDO had become a synthetic natural disaster.”

— Michael Lewis

260. “A man who can tell a good story can make a good living as a broker.”

— Michael Lewis

261. “People often work hard to obtain information they already have.”

— Michael Lewis

262. “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

263. “The problems that had been Obama’s problems for the past eight years were about to become Trump’s problems. But his people didn’t seem to want to know about them.”

— Michael Lewis

264. “If it doesn’t happen, it never was going to happen. If you never did it, it wasn’t there to begin with.”

— Michael Lewis

265. “Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.”

— Michael Lewis

266. “Debt ownership in a shaky enterprise means control, for when a company fails to meet its interest payments, a bondholder can foreclose and liquidate the company.”

— Michael Lewis

267. “If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago. This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid.”

— Michael Lewis

268. “Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions.”

— Michael Lewis

269. “What’s fun is watching actors of that calibre bring them to life. It’s incredible. Christian Bale spent a day with the character he plays and after my year of being with him I couldn’t have generated the same view of him. They have a different way of looking at people, it’s fascinating to watch.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

271. “With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow.”

— Michael Lewis

272. “Knowledge is literally prediction,” said Morey. “Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally.”

— Michael Lewis

273. “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

274. “What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions – if they can get rich making dumb decisions?”

— Michael Lewis

275. “And who would deny that the consumer demand for ever more stuff at ever cheaper prices is one of the great deterministic forces in history?”

— Michael Lewis

276. “The fact that it is such an opaque industry should be alarming,” Brad said. “The fact that the people who make the most money want the least clarity possible – that should be alarming, too.”

— Michael Lewis

277. “A tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.”

— Michael Lewis

278. “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

279. “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

280. “The “consumer loan” piles that Wall Street firms, led by Goldman Sachs, asked AIG FP to insure went from being 2 percent subprime mortgages to being 95 percent subprime mortgages. In a matter of months, AIG FP, in effect, bought $50 billion in triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds by insuring them against default.”

— Michael Lewis

281. “There has been this – and it’s reflected in the broadcasts – this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.”

— Michael Lewis

282. “The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.”

— Michael Lewis

283. “In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say,” Can you not mention that the government gave this?”

— Michael Lewis

284. “It’s the worldview in which if people tip in a restaurant to which they will never return it counts as a puzzle.”

— Michael Lewis

285. “The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life.”

— Michael Lewis

286. “Once handed the money, Paulson abandoned his promised strategy and instead essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a few others unnaturally selected for survival.”

— Michael Lewis

287. “It actually went pretty well, until they got onto the topic of marijuana. “So you got caught smoking weed your freshman and sophomore years,” said the Rockets interviewer. “What happened your junior year?” Williams just shook his head and said, “They stopped testing me. And if you’re not going to test me, I’m gonna smoke!”

— Michael Lewis

288. “The trouble was that clarity and simplicity were more important in computer language than in human language.”

— Michael Lewis

289. “I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off.”

— Michael Lewis

290. “I don’t think there is a national pasttime. Watching TV is a national pasttime. Really. If there is a national pasttime, it is watching TV.”

— Michael Lewis

291. “It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people’s behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.”

— Michael Lewis

292. “In 1980 only 23 percent of state pension money had been invested in the stock market; by 2008 the number had risen to 60 percent.”

— Michael Lewis

293. “Lippmann had rented a private room in some restaurant and invited Eisman and his partners to what they assumed was something other than a free meal. “Even when he had an honest agenda, there was always something underneath the honest agenda,” said Vinny.”

— Michael Lewis

294. “At one point he turned to Christie and said, “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”

— Michael Lewis

295. “I’d thought it strange, after the financial crisis, in which Goldman had played such an important role, that the only Goldman Sachs employee who had been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs. I’d thought it even stranger that government prosecutors had argued that the Russian shouldn’t be freed on bail because the Goldman Sachs computer code, in the wrong hands, could be used to “manipulate markets in unfair ways.”

— Michael Lewis

296. “That was somewhere near the middle of a modern gold rush. Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in New York and London.”

— Michael Lewis

297. “The general idea was to sell their software first to rich technophiles and then, gradually, infiltrate the minds of the middle-class owners of suburban tract houses.”

— Michael Lewis

298. “Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.”

— Michael Lewis

299. “If you are going to start a regulatory regime from scratch, you’d design it to protect middle-and lower-middle-income people, because the opportunity for them to get ripped off was so high. Instead what we had was a regime where those were the people who were protected the least.” Eisman.”

— Michael Lewis

300. “The first thing you learn on the trading floor is that when large numbers of people are after the same commodity, be it a stock, a bond, or a job, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued.”

— Michael Lewis