Top 100 Steven D. Levitt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The key to learning is feedback. It is nearly impossible to learn anything without it.”

— Steven D. Levitt

2. “Don’t trust, just verify.”

— Steven D. Levitt

3. “An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.”

— Steven D. Levitt

4. “The conventional wisdom is often wrong.”

— Steven D. Levitt

5. “When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.”

— Steven D. Levitt

6. “I don’t expect perfection, I expect excellence.” I expect 100 percent effort in all you do.”

— Steven D. Levitt

7. “Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.”

— Steven D. Levitt

8. “Name-calling will make you an enemy, not an ally, and if that is your objective, then persuasion is probably not what you were after in the first place.”

— Steven D. Levitt

9. “How are you supposed to get everyone to pull in the same direction when they are all pulling primarily for themselves?”

— Steven D. Levitt

10. “Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”

— Steven D. Levitt

11. “People who buy annuities, it turns out, live longer than people who don’t, and not because the people who buy annuities are healthier to start with. The evidence suggests that an annuity’s steady payout provides a little extra incentive to keep chugging along.”

— Steven D. Levitt

12. “Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.”

— Steven D. Levitt

13. “No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.”

— Steven D. Levitt

14. “There is a difference between correlation and causation – many people mistake one for the other.”

— Steven D. Levitt

15. “Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.”

— Steven D. Levitt

16. “Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them – or, often, deciphering them – is the key to understanding a problem, and how it might be solved.”

— Steven D. Levitt

17. “Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent – all depending on who wields it and how.”

— Steven D. Levitt

18. “People aren’t “good” or “bad.” People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated – for good or ill – if only you find the right levers.”

— Steven D. Levitt

19. “Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.”

— Steven D. Levitt

20. “If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”

— Steven D. Levitt

21. “When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.”

— Steven D. Levitt

22. “Levitt admits to having the reading interests of a tweener girl, the Twilight series and Harry Potter in particular.”

— Steven D. Levitt

23. “Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.”

— Steven D. Levitt

24. “Whatever problem you’re trying to solve, make sure you’re not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention.”

— Steven D. Levitt

25. “And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking – our daily decisions, our laws, our governance – on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.”

— Steven D. Levitt

26. “We are blind to our blindness.”

— Steven D. Levitt

27. “The fact is that solving problems is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it.”

— Steven D. Levitt

28. “I do think that the standard media is controlled by the conventional wisdom about global warming. We’ve come to believe – from reading a lot of articles and talking to a lot of scientists – that there’s another side to be heard.”

— Steven D. Levitt

29. “We associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.”

— Steven D. Levitt

30. “It has long been said that the three hardest words to say in the English language are I love you. We heartily disagree! For most people, it is much harder to say I don’t know. That’s a shame, for until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.”

— Steven D. Levitt

31. “If it takes a lot of courage to admit you don’t know all the answers, just imagine how hard it is to admit you don’t even know the right question.”

— Steven D. Levitt

32. “Could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed?”

— Steven D. Levitt

33. “Pay attention to how people respond; if their response surprises or frustrates you, learn from it and try something different.”

— Steven D. Levitt

34. “Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent – all depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.”

— Steven D. Levitt

35. “For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.”

— Steven D. Levitt

36. “A growing body of research suggests that even the smartest people tend to seek out evidence that confirms what they already think, rather than new information that would give them a more robust view of reality.”

— Steven D. Levitt

37. “What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?”

— Steven D. Levitt

38. “Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed.”

— Steven D. Levitt

39. “Since the science of economics is primarily a set of tools, as opposed to a subject matter, then no subject, however offbeat, need be beyond its reach.”

— Steven D. Levitt

40. “The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally; that we think from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations; that we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism. That we think like – ahem – a Freak.”

— Steven D. Levitt

41. “Most of us have a lot more experience being consumers than producers, so we tend to view things through the lens of demand rather than supply.”

— Steven D. Levitt

42. “After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it’s fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you’d spend the winnings – much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.”

— Steven D. Levitt

43. “If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That’s easy: in most cases, the cost of saying “I don’t know” is higher than the cost of being wrong – at least for the individual.”

— Steven D. Levitt

44. “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’ – which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants – becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

— Steven D. Levitt

45. “When failure is demonized, people will try to avoid it at all costs – even when it represents nothing more than a temporary setback.”

— Steven D. Levitt

46. “But guns are not the whole story. In Switzerland, every adult male is issued an assault rifle for militia duty and is allowed to keep the gun at home. On a per capita basis, Switzerland has more firearms than just about any other country, and yet it is one of the safest places in the world. In other words, guns do not cause crime.”

— Steven D. Levitt

47. “Why do so many frown so sternly at the idea of having fun? Perhaps out of fear that it connotes you aren’t serious. But best as we can tell, there is no correlation between appearing to be serious and actually being good at what you do. In fact an argument can be made that the opposite is true.”

— Steven D. Levitt

48. “There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.”

— Steven D. Levitt

49. “It also means that the pain of negative feedback will for most people trump the pleasure from positive feedback.”

— Steven D. Levitt

50. “If you are willing to confront the obvious, you will end up asking a lot of questions that others don’t.”

— Steven D. Levitt