Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

258. “I’d stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me me as totally preposterous-which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

260. “Charlie Ledley – curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley – was odd in his belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.”

— Michael Lewis

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “‘Where are the ratings agencies in all this?’ And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a physical reaction because they didn’t want to say it. It was a smirk.”

— Michael Lewis

266. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

268. “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

269. “This was only one of many recent changes along the capitalist food chain. Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys.”

— Michael Lewis

270. “As a rule, any loan that had been turned into an acronym or abbreviation could more clearly be called a “subprime loan,” but the bond market didn’t want to be clear.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “They appeared to know enough to justify their jobs, and nothing more.”

— Michael Lewis

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it.”

— Michael Lewis

286. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

290. “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

291. “When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos.”

— Michael Lewis

292. “The more egregious the rating agencies’ mistakes, the bigger the opportunity for the Wall Street trading desks. In.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

294. “Danny and Vinny both thought the problem in this case was Eisman’s affinity for Bear Stearns. The most hated firm on Wall Street, famous mainly for its total indifference to the good opinion of its competitors, Eisman identified with the place!”

— Michael Lewis

295. “After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir.”

— Michael Lewis

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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