Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Send me a list of the 2006 deals with high no-doc loans.” Eisman, predisposed to suspect fraud in the market, wanted to bet against Americans who had been lent money without having been required to show evidence of income or employment. “I figured Lippmann was going to send me deals that had twenty percent no docs. He sent us a list and none of them had less than fifty percent.”

— Michael Lewis

302. “There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, “It’s impossible to know for sure.” “What will the price of oil be in ten years?” was such a question. That didn’t mean you gave up trying to find an answer; you just couched that answer in probabilistic terms.”

— Michael Lewis

303. “He didn’t worry about how screwed-up the market for some security became because he knew that eventually it would be disciplined by logic: Businesses either thrived or failed. Loans either were paid off or were defaulted upon.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

305. “You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book.”

— Michael Lewis

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “In context the computer programmers appeared idle. They sat quietly, stared into their screens and sipped cappuccinos. And yet they were by far the most important people on board Hyperion.”

— Michael Lewis

310. “He wore the same shorts and t-shirts to work for days on end. He refused to wear shoes with laces. He refused to wear watches or even his wedding ring. To calm himself at work he often blared heavy metal music.”

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

313. “Making profits on Wall Street is a bit like eating the stuffing from a turkey. Some higher authority must first put the stuffing into the turkey. The turkey was stuffed more generously in the 1980s than ever before.”

— Michael Lewis

314. “Lance was to computer programming what Joyce was to literature, possibly profound but also baffling.”

— Michael Lewis

315. “In eight years alone – 2010–2018 – the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people.”

— Michael Lewis

316. “The options suited the two men’s personalities: They never had to be sure of anything. Both were predisposed to feel that people, and by extension markets, were too certain about inherently uncertain things. Both sensed that people, and by extension markets, had difficulty attaching the appropriate probabilities to highly improbable events. Both had trouble generating conviction of their own but no trouble at all reacting to what they viewed as the false conviction of others.”

— Michael Lewis

317. “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

318. “As the bonds were all priced off the Moody’s rating, the most overpriced bonds were the bonds that had been most ineptly rated. And the bonds that had been most ineptly rated were the bonds that Wall Street firms had tricked the rating agencies into rating most ineptly.”

— Michael Lewis

319. “The very first day, we said, ‘There’s going to come a time when we’re going to make a fortune shorting this stuff. It’s going to blow up. We just don’t know how or when.”

— Michael Lewis

320. “Thirdly-but not lastly-there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen. The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw. There was a lot you couldn’t see when you watched a game.”

— Michael Lewis

321. “The entire health industry lies about what things cost to make,” she said. “I know what things cost because I made them.”

— Michael Lewis

322. “The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally, to 4:1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” says Zelman. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was four to one. In Los Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami, eight-point-five to one.”

— Michael Lewis

323. “Inside every alienated hacker who thinks he stands for the “good things that ultimately don’t matter to most businesses” there is a tycoon struggling to get out.”

— Michael Lewis

324. “But if you worry about everything, you wind up worrying about nothing.”

— Michael Lewis

325. “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

326. “All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers.”

— Michael Lewis

327. “Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn’t speak very much for the larger culture.”

— Michael Lewis

328. “The difference in Billy wasn’t what had happened to him, but what hadn’t. He had a life he hadn’t led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed.”

— Michael Lewis

329. “Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: When attached to a telephone, they could produce even more money. How could they produce money without experience? Answer: Producing in an investment bank was less a matter of skill and more a matter of intangibles – flair, persistence, and luck.”

— Michael Lewis

330. “The Yankees understood what New York understood, that there was no shame in buying success, and maybe because of their lack of shame they did what they did better than anyone in the business.”

— Michael Lewis

331. “Which Wall Street big shots Eisman had insulted was a matter of which Wall Street big shots’ presence Eisman was allowed into.”

— Michael Lewis

332. “Whenever Wall Street people tried to argue – as they often did – that the subprime lending problem was caused by the mendacity and financial irresponsibility of ordinary Americans, he’d.”

— Michael Lewis

333. “The way it feels to me,′ he said, ’is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them.”

— Michael Lewis

334. “Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.”

— Michael Lewis

335. “The long-shot bet, in some strange way, was a young man’s game. Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai no longer felt, or acted, quite so young.”

— Michael Lewis

336. “He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt.”

— Michael Lewis

337. “Why isn’t someone smarter than us doing this?”

— Michael Lewis

338. “Wall Street bond trading desks, staffed by people making seven figures a year, set out o coax from the brain-dead guys making high five figures the highest possible ratings for the worst possible loans. They performed the task with Ivy League thoroughness and efficiency.”

— Michael Lewis

339. “Eisman was quick to see narratives, he explained the world in stories, and this was one of the stories he used to explain himself. The.”

— Michael Lewis

340. “Steal from those beneath you; attack those above you.”

— Michael Lewis

341. “Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.”

— Michael Lewis

342. “It was just eye-opening: to see how much your geography could determine the opportunities available to you.”

— Michael Lewis

343. “This conceit went hand in glove with the investment bankers’ belief that they could control their destiny, which, as we shall see, they couldn’t.”

— Michael Lewis

344. “Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them – to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch. Each of these people told you something about the state of the financial system, in the same way that people who survive a plane crash told you something about the accident, and also about the nature of people who survive accidents.”

— Michael Lewis

345. “What’s amazing is that they make a market in this fantasy stuff,” said Druskin. “It’s not a real asset.”

— Michael Lewis

346. “Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.”

— Michael Lewis

347. “As a former gas station attendant, parking lot attendant, medical resident and current Goldman Sachs screwee, I am offended.”

— Michael Lewis

348. “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. No investment bank owned by its employees would have leveraged itself 35:1, or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine CDOs.”

— Michael Lewis

349. “2005 there would be $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Half a trillion dollars in subprime mortgage–backed bonds in a single year.”

— Michael Lewis

350. “I confess some part of me thought, If only I’d stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.”

— Michael Lewis