Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

321. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

332. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “The larger the number of people involved, the easier it was for them to delude themselves that what they were doing must be smart.”

— Michael Lewis

342. “Why were they prepaying so fast? Vinny asked himself. “It made no sense to me. Then I saw that the reason the prepayments were so high is that they were involuntary.”

— Michael Lewis

343. “Historians imposed false order upon random events, too, probably without even realizing what they were doing. Amos had a phrase for this. “Creeping determinism,” he called it – and jotted in his notes one of its many costs: “He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

— Michael Lewis

344. “The source of his unhappiness was, as usual, other people.”

— Michael Lewis

345. “It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you.”

— Michael Lewis

346. “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.”

— Michael Lewis

347. “Fracking – to take one example – was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE. Yet fracking has collapsed the price of oil and gas and led to American energy independence. Solar and wind technologies are another example. The.”

— Michael Lewis

348. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

350. “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