Top 100 Michael Lewis Quotes
#1. when I ran mortgages, I religiously took people from the back office. At first I did it for moral reasons. But it worked. They appreciated it. They didn't feel like the world owed them a living. They were more loyal.
Michael Lewis
#2. I recall that one of the first investment bankers I met taught me a poem. God gave you eyes, plagiarize. A
Michael Lewis
#3. 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
#4. People like Justin Frankel and Daniel Sheldon linger on the fringe until they dream up something that has great commercial potential. Then some big company swoops in and buys them, or they give birth to the big company themselves.
Michael Lewis
#5. Eisman was now explaining why the world was going to blow up, but his partners were only half-listening ... because the financial world was blowing up.
Michael Lewis
#6. 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
#7. In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.
Michael Lewis
#8. The world of "preserving" that wealth. He had no interest in preservation of any sort.
Michael Lewis
#9. Kittu was fascinated that such a technically minded person could be so happy groping blindly toward big piles of money. "Jim Clark has a clarity of vision that is prompted by the purest form of greed," says Kittu.
Michael Lewis
#10. The great thing about baseball players, from the point of view of personal hygiene, is how seldom they break a sweat.
Michael Lewis
#11. The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.
Michael Lewis
#12. Which Wall Street big shots Eisman had insulted was a matter of which Wall Street big shots' presence Eisman was allowed into.
Michael Lewis
#13. The fuses had been lit and could not be extinguished. All that remained was to observe the speed of the spark, and the size of the explosions.
Michael Lewis
#14. That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
Michael Lewis
#15. Who takes out a home loan and doesn't make the first payment?" asked Danny Moses, putting the matter one way. "Who the fuck lends money to people who can't make the first payment?" asked Eisman, putting it another. When
Michael Lewis
#16. I was gonna put him on the bus ... I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.
Michael Lewis
#17. As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. ("Bud") Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A's success "an aberration," but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how'd they do it? What was their secret?
Michael Lewis
#18. The price volatility within each trading day in the U.S. stock market between 2010 and 2013 was nearly 40 percent higher than the volatility between 2004 and 2006, for instance. There were days in 2011 in which volatility was higher than in the most volatile days of the dot-com bubble.
Michael Lewis
#19. If you ever care to see how all the world's most awful jokes spread, spend a day on a bond trading desk. When the Challenger space shuttle disintegrated, six people called me from six points on the globe to explain that NASA stands for Need Another Seven Astronauts.
Michael Lewis
#20. With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow.
Michael Lewis
#21. When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.
Michael Lewis
#22. 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
#23. After the war Avi, by then twenty-two years old, finally decided what he would study: psychology. Had you asked him just then why he picked psychology, "I would say I want to understand the human soul. Not the mind. The soul.
Michael Lewis
#24. Bond people pose the same problem to a cultural anthropologist as a non-literate tribe deep in the Amazon. In
Michael Lewis
#25. There is nothing more satisfying to me," he said, "than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it.
Michael Lewis
#26. 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
#27. if you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.
Michael Lewis
#28. Fair enough, Gutfreund had once been a trader, but that was as relevant as an old woman's claim that she was once quite a dish.
Michael Lewis
#29. Why do you always answer a question with another question?" "Clarity," he said.
Michael Lewis
#30. 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
#31. In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom ... .
Michael Lewis
#32. 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
#33. No partnership, for that matter, would have hired me, or anyone remotely like me. Was there ever any correlation between an ability to get into, and out of, Princeton, and a talent for taking financial risk? At
Michael Lewis
#34. He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.
Michael Lewis
#35. My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.
Michael Lewis
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Every form of strength is also a weakness. Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.
Michael Lewis
#39. 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
#40. Golfing with Eisman wasn't like golfing with other Wall Street people. The round usually began with a collective discomfort on the first tee, after Eisman turned up wearing something that violated the Wall Street golfer's notion of propriety.
Michael Lewis
#41. He said they wanted a place where they could just sit and talk to each other all day long without the distraction of a university," said Slovic
Michael Lewis
#42. It was a measure of how much money people were making in the bond market that the magazine Institutional Investor was about to create a hot list of people who worked in it, called The 20 Rising Stars of Fixed Income. It was a measure of how much money people
Michael Lewis
#43. The nice thing about things that are urgent," he liked to say, "is that if you wait long enough they aren't urgent anymore." "I
Michael Lewis
#44. 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
#45. If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa.
Michael Lewis
#46. The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.
Michael Lewis
#47. The trouble, Danny suspected, was that "the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don't communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real - that they are just something on somebody's mind.
Michael Lewis
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. The new companies often put the old ones out of business; the young were forever eating the old. The whole of the Valley was a speeded-up Oedipal drama. In this drama technology played a very clear role. It was the murder weapon.
Michael Lewis
#52. Those who say don't know, those who know don't say
Michael Lewis
#53. It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time.
Michael Lewis
#54. Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.
Michael Lewis
#55. Before Volcker's speech, bonds had been conservative investments, into which investors put their savings when they didn't fancy a gamble in the stock market. After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it.
Michael Lewis
#56. Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away- far, far and away- the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is. [Eric Walker]
Michael Lewis
#57. The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.
Michael Lewis
#58. Perhaps because they were so enamored of the official rules of finance, the Germans proved especially vulnerable to a false idea the rules encouraged: that there is such a thing as a riskless asset.
Michael Lewis
#59. Did I think I was doing God's work?" he said later. "No. But I did think market efficiency was something important for the economy.
Michael Lewis
#60. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. "Confirmation
Michael Lewis
#61. The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.
Michael Lewis
#62. It's not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria - to believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded - without being insane.
Michael Lewis
#63. Goldman Sachs did not leave the house before it began to burn; it was merely the first to dash through the exit - and then it closed the door behind it.
Michael Lewis
#64. 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
#65. One of these people - a Canadian, of all things - stands at the picture's center, organizing the many smaller pictures into a coherent whole. His willingness to throw open a window on the American financial world, and to show people what it has become, still takes my breath away.
Michael Lewis
#66. Isocrates: Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.
Michael Lewis
#68. And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside
Michael Lewis
#69. Clark couldn't stand the idea of anyone's working for him without having the chance to accumulate a bit of wealth.
Michael Lewis
#71. He concluded that there was effectively no way for an accountant assigned to audit a giant Wall Street firm to figure out whether it was making money or losing money.
Michael Lewis
#72. But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.
Michael Lewis
#73. The Boston Red Sox were obsessed with outcomes; he with process. That's what kept him sane.
Michael Lewis
#74. Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn't go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn't ever do it twice.
Michael Lewis
#75. Had Volcker never pushed through his radical change in policy, the world would be many bond traders and one memoir the poorer.
Michael Lewis
#76. A vast industry of stockbrokers, financial planners, and investment advisers skims a fortune for themselves off the top in exchange for passing their clients' money on to people who, as a whole, cannot possibly outperform the market.
Michael Lewis
#77. Nothing short of the U.S. government could save them.
Michael Lewis
#78. 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
#79. Best of all, he gave us a rule of thumb about information in the markets that I later found useful: "Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say.
Michael Lewis
#80. The great thing about this project," said Tim, "is that it's software that talks to physical things rather than software that just talks to other software. You can see the effect of what you are doing.
Michael Lewis
#82. The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it's comforting; because it's so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.
Michael Lewis
#83. Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.
Michael Lewis
#84. The Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished.
Michael Lewis
#85. A Home without Equity Is Just a Rental with Debt,
Michael Lewis
#86. A Schwalling is when he does something unintentionally idiotic that makes him look stupid,
Michael Lewis
#87. Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.
Michael Lewis
#88. I procrastinate to a point where I'm filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It's usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.
Michael Lewis
#89. Years later he would say that when he'd decided to become a professional baseball player, it was the only time he'd done something just for the money, and that he'd never do something just for the money ever again. He would never again let the market dictate the direction of his life.
Michael Lewis
#90. Frustrated people needed to undo some feature of their environment, while regretful people needed to undo their own actions. "The
Michael Lewis
#91. She dropped the matter, and his birthday remained May 28. Armed with the Social Security card, the birth certificate, and the letter from Principal Simpson of the Briarcrest Christian School, they drove the next day to the Department of Motor Vehicles. This time they had Collins in tow. Collins
Michael Lewis
#92. 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
#93. There is a magic moment, during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is about to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer [read bond trader] will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on.
Michael Lewis
#94. For geniuses, they are really dumb," she said. "Some of them are really pampered: They can't even put together a cardboard box. They don't think you do something. They think you call somebody.
Michael Lewis
#95. Don't worry where I am. I'll tell you when I get there.
Michael Lewis
#96. He was the person for whom the clock was always running out, the game was always tied, and the ball was always in his hands.
Michael Lewis
#97. Danny the whole idea of proving that people weren't rational felt a bit like proving that people didn't have fur. Obviously people were not rational, in any meaningful sense of that term.
Michael Lewis
#98. Guys who can't get a job on Wall Street get a job at Moody's, as one Goldman Sachs trader-turned-hedge fund manager put it.
Michael Lewis
#99. The simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him. - Leo Tolstoy, 1897
Michael Lewis
#100. Vision, the challenge of the next century, the new millennium, the road ahead.
Michael Lewis
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