Top 400 Michael Lewis Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Michael Lewis

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

— Michael Lewis

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “Ben walked around with some very tiny fraction of his mind alert to the probabilities of disasters in real life. People underestimated these, too, he believed, because they didn’t want to think about them. There was a tendency, in markets and life, for people to respond to the possibility of extreme events in one of two ways: flight or fight. “Fight is, ‘I’m going to get my guns,’” he said. “Flight is, ‘We’re all doomed so I can’t do anything about it.”

— Michael Lewis

359. “After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, “You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are.”

— Michael Lewis

360. “Inside a dark pool, no one but the broker who ran it had any idea what was happening.”

— Michael Lewis

361. “This gorgeous financial myopia was common in the Valley, and one of the chief sources of its success.”

— Michael Lewis

362. “To defend the Club against the new idea, the members had to distort the idea. By the end of the 2003 baseball season I had learned something from publishing Moneyball. I learned that if you look long enough for an argument against reason you will find it.”

— Michael Lewis

363. “If you’re in a business where you can do only one thing and it doesn’t work out, it’s hard for your bosses to be mad at you.”

— Michael Lewis

364. “Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.”

— Michael Lewis

365. “Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with it.”

— Michael Lewis

366. “From the end of 2005 until the middle of 2007, Wall Street firms created somewhere between $200 and $400 billion in subprime-backed CDOs: No.”

— Michael Lewis

367. “March 2008 the stock market had finally grasped what every mortgage bond salesman had long known: Someone had lost at least $240 billion. But who? Morgan Stanley still owned $13 billion or so in CDOs, courtesy of Howie Hubler. The idiots in Germany owned some, Wing Chau and CDO managers like him owned some.”

— Michael Lewis

368. “You could argue the banks are much better capitalised than they were going into the crisis, and everyone’s in a much more vigilant state because they still remember the crisis.”

— Michael Lewis

369. “Trump didn’t invent this desire. He was just its ultimate expression.”

— Michael Lewis

370. “Each time, Lippmann would talk a mile a minute, and Danny and Vinny would stare in wonder. Their meetings acquired the flavor of a postmodern literary puzzle: The story rang true even as the narrator seemed entirely unreliable.”

— Michael Lewis

371. “Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire – to remain ignorant.”

— Michael Lewis

372. “Microsoft had made it clear that the only way to preserve your station in Valley life was to create a monopoly. If you created a monopoly, you were at least partially exempt from the ordinary rapid cycle of creation and destruction.”

— Michael Lewis

373. “He walked around the Las Vegas casino incredulous at the spectacle before him: seven thousand people, all of whom seemed delighted with the world as they found it. A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen.”

— Michael Lewis

374. “Because his memory is so selective, he has no scars from prior experience,” said Vinny.”

— Michael Lewis

375. “The people on the short side of the subprime mortgage market had gambled with the odds in their favor. The people on the other side – the entire financial system, essentially – had gambled with the odds against them. Up to this point, the story of the big short could not be simpler. What’s strange and complicated about it, however, is that pretty much all the important people on both sides of the gamble left the table rich.”

— Michael Lewis

376. “Aldinger, collected his $100 million, Eisman was on his way to becoming the financial market’s first socialist. “When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off,” he said. His mind was now fully.”

— Michael Lewis

377. “I set out to write this book only because I thought it would be better to tell the story than to go on living the story.”

— Michael Lewis

378. “Our players aren’t our problem. But we are what our record says we are.”

— Michael Lewis

379. “The trick was not simply to write the code that turned information into pictures but to find the best pictures to draw – shapes and colors that led the mind to meaning.”

— Michael Lewis

380. “His experience with Household Finance had disabused him of any hope that the government would intercede to prevent rich corporations from doing bad things to poor people.”

— Michael Lewis

381. “Light fades as it travels; the fainter it becomes, the less capable it is of transmitting data.”

— Michael Lewis

382. “It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”

— Michael Lewis

383. “The American Home of the Future, it went without saying, would be controlled and monitored by a computer. The computer would permit the owner to enter into a new, fantastic relationship with his dwelling.”

— Michael Lewis

384. “People think that complex is an advanced state of complicated,” said Zoran. “It’s not. A car key is simple. A car is complicated. A car in traffic is complex.”

— Michael Lewis

385. “In the end he plotted both the deaths and the restrictions imposed to prevent them, and saw that the earlier the restrictions imposed in any given outbreak, the fewer the deaths. In the case of Philadelphia, he wrote, “the closing of schools and churches, banning of public meetings, and banning of large public gatherings occurred relatively late into the epidemic” – nearly one month after the outbreak began and just a week before its peak.”

— Michael Lewis

386. “I wonder,” James wrote, “if we haven’t become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them.”

— Michael Lewis

387. “The frantic stupidity of Wall Street’s stock order routers and algorithms was simply an extension into the computer of the willful ignorance of its salespeople.”

— Michael Lewis

388. “All that was clear 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

389. “People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed.”

— Michael Lewis

390. “Regret was the ham in the back of the deli that caused people to switch from turkey to roast beef.”

— Michael Lewis

391. “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.” Then he left. The group continued to meet without him. The.”

— Michael Lewis

392. “The expression “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” actually isn’t usually true for human beings. It is for bacteria, however.”

— Michael Lewis

393. “The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,” she said. “Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.”

— Michael Lewis

394. “The CDC did many things. It published learned papers on health crises, after the fact. It managed, very carefully, public perception of itself. But when the shooting started, it leapt into the nearest hole, while others took fire.”

— Michael Lewis

395. “Communicable meant a person could give it to another person. You could get Lyme disease, for instance, but you couldn’t give it to somebody else. Communicable diseases were the diseases that created crises.”

— Michael Lewis

396. “The root of the CDC’s behavior was simple: fear. They didn’t want to take any action for which they might later be blamed.”

— Michael Lewis

397. “Here is the frightening aspect of the global supply chain,” said Joe. “When there is a surge in demand, inventory goes to zero. Just-in-time manufacturing. Great concept! Horrible in a pandemic.”

— Michael Lewis

398. “But not for him. “This is the crux of science,” he’d say with enthusiasm. “All science is modeling. In all science you are abstracting from nature. The question is: is it a useful abstraction.” Useful, to Bob Glass, meant: Does it help solve a problem?”

— Michael Lewis

399. “When people asked Sam for his time, they assumed they’d posed a yes or no question, and the noises Sam made always sounded more like “yes” than like “no.” They didn’t know that inside Sam’s mind was a dial, with zero on one end and one hundred on the other. All he had done, when he said yes, was to assign some non-zero probability to the proposed use of his time.”

— Michael Lewis

400. “The public health texts of the future will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an infectious disease pandemic.”

— Michael Lewis