Top 100 Quotes About Michael Lewis
#1. The two contemporary writers whom I consider as role models are Janet Malcolm and Michael Lewis.
Malcolm Gladwell
#2. I'm a big Michael Lewis fan. That said, my favorite Lewis book was 'The Blind Side.'
Bart Chilton
#3. Michael Lewis has the amazing ability to take complex formulas and concepts and turn them into page-turners.
Adam McKay
#4. Michael Lewis, author of 'Moneyball,' got special access for a profile of Obama for 'Vanity Fair' - but Obama insisted on redlining his quotes.
Ben Shapiro
#5. 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
#6. All these subprime companies were calling and hollering at him: You're wrong. Your data's wrong. And he just hollered back at them, 'It's YOUR fucking data!
Michael Lewis
#9. Steal from those beneath you; attack those above you.
Michael Lewis
#10. Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions.
Michael Lewis
#11. I love Greg," said one of his bosses at Deutsche Bank. "I have nothing bad to say about him except that he's a fucking whack job.
Michael Lewis
#12. the utilitarians. They were interested only in the computer's crude and brutish ability to impose its will on the world around it.
Michael Lewis
#13. He was pressured to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat did not come naturally to Steve Eisman. He could fake upbeat, and sometimes did, but he was happier not bothering.
Michael Lewis
#14. I recall that one of the first investment bankers I met taught me a poem. God gave you eyes, plagiarize. A
Michael Lewis
#15. No trader or investor wanted to poke around suburbs to find out whether the homeowner to whom he had just lent money was creditworthy. For the home mortgage to become a bond it had to be depersonalised. At
Michael Lewis
#16. There was of course no point in trying to monitor Eisman. He saw himself as a crusader, a champion of the underdog, an enemy of sinister authority. He saw himself, roughly speaking, as Spider-Man.
Michael Lewis
#17. Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.
Michael Lewis
#18. 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
#19. Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification. Amos's
Michael Lewis
#20. We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle.
Michael Lewis
#21. 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
#22. There is no such thing as a riskless asset. The reason an asset pays a return is that it carries risk.
Michael Lewis
#23. 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
#24. For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn't, someone else would.
Michael Lewis
#25. 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
#26. If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives.
Michael Lewis
#27. The smaller the sample size, the more likely that it is unrepresentative of the wider population..."people can be taught the correct rule, perhaps even with little difficulty. The point remains that people do not follow the correct rule, when left to their own devices.
Michael Lewis
#28. This completed the curious reversal in roles that occurred in the early 1980s, when thrifts became traders and traders thrifts.
Michael Lewis
#29. When something becomes obvious to you," he said, "you immediately think surely someone else is doing this.
Michael Lewis
#30. By early 2009 the risks and losses associated with more than a trillion dollars' worth of bad investments were transferred from big Wall Street firms to the U.S. taxpayer.
Michael Lewis
#31. The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.
Michael Lewis
#32. This was yet another consequence of turning Wall Street partnerships into public corporations: It turned them into objects of speculation. It was no longer the social and economic relevance of a bank that rendered it too big to fail, but the number of side bets that had been made upon it.
Michael Lewis
#33. 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
#34. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.
Michael Lewis
#35. Losing shouldn't be fun. It's not fun for me. If I'm going to be miserable, you're going to be miserable.
Michael Lewis
#36. One piece of bad luck was rapid technical change, which was a weapon that oddball upstarts could use against the enormous gray corporations.
Michael Lewis
#37. At other places management says, 'Well, gee, fellas, do we really want to bet the ranch on this deal?' Lewie was not only willing to bet the ranch. He was willing to hire people and let them bet the ranch, too. His attitude was: 'Sure, what the fuck, it's only a ranch.
Michael Lewis
#38. Only someone who has Asperger's would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus,
Michael Lewis
#39. The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence.
Michael Lewis
#40. 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
#41. The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people who didn't use it.
Michael Lewis
#42. The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A.
Michael Lewis
#43. Once he had identified the new new thing, all he needed was some really smart, passionate engineers to chase after it and make it happen.
Michael Lewis
#44. The world of "preserving" that wealth. He had no interest in preservation of any sort.
Michael Lewis
#45. Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.
C.S. Lewis
#46. 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
#47. We change for the good so long as good exists around us.
Michael Lewis
#48. What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: One hand, one million dollars, no tears.
Michael Lewis
#49. It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in pointing out that it was broken.
Michael Lewis
#50. Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions. Refusing to draft college players might have been one of them.
Bill James
Michael Lewis
#51. Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it.
Michael Lewis
#52. The great thing about baseball players, from the point of view of personal hygiene, is how seldom they break a sweat.
Michael Lewis
#53. When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.
Michael Lewis
#54. It is far better to keep the enemy close, by bribing him with stock options, than to have him out in the wild, foraging.
Michael Lewis
#55. At SGI board meetings ... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.
Michael Lewis
#56. The main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. "When things go wrong it's their problem,
Michael Lewis
#57. I don't think there is a national pasttime. Watching TV is a national pasttime. Really. If there is a national pasttime, it is watching TV.
Michael Lewis
#58. It was not that he lacked values, but he had a keen sense that at times the ends justified the means, and an equally keen sense of his own interests. There
Michael Lewis
#59. We're helping the consumer. Because we're taking him out of his high interest rate credit card debt and putting him into lower interest rate mortgage debt.
Michael Lewis
#60. There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.
Michael Lewis
#61. We tried to trademark proximity, but you can't because it's a word,
Michael Lewis
#62. The professors argued that Netscape courted disaster from the start, by taunting Microsoft. Mooning the Giant
Michael Lewis
#63. Any person with the brains to get into the IIT's and the gumption to get himself to the United States was capable of all manner of miracles.
Michael Lewis
#64. The programmers decided the steps everyone on board Hyperion would need to take to do everything from dimming the lights to raising the sails.
Michael Lewis
#65. They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.
Michael Lewis
#66. The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.
Michael Lewis
#67. The Irish turned in on themselves and bid up their own land prices in the most extraordinary ways. The Irish people stepped in and guaranteed the banks, and committed to repay sums they can't afford to repay, and essentially committed themselves to generations of suffering.
Michael Lewis
#68. When I grew up Carl Lewis was still running, Maurice Greene was running - he was that figure I see, like Michael Johnson. I really wanted to look up to the fast guys - so those two guys were some of the guys I looked up to.
Tyson Gay
#69. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.
Michael Lewis
#70. Which Wall Street big shots Eisman had insulted was a matter of which Wall Street big shots' presence Eisman was allowed into.
Michael Lewis
#71. What's fun is watching actors of that calibre bring them to life. It's incredible. Christian Bale spent a day with the character he plays and after my year of being with him I couldn't have generated the same view of him. They have a different way of looking at people, it's fascinating to watch.
Michael Lewis
#72. Dont worry about where i am , i'll let you know when i get there .
Michael Lewis
#73. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.
Michael Lewis
#74. A commercial banker wasn't any more a troublemaker than Dagwood Bumstead.
Michael Lewis
#76. 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
#77. The vicious cycle that is bringing down European states is not going to hit USA, at least not for a while, at the level of the federal government. The same cannot be said of state and local governments.
Michael Lewis
#78. The incentives are still rotten, and people are still paid to do things they shouldn't be doing. The reforms did not really address the incentives, the system is still dysfunctional and there are still behavioural issues that need to be addressed.
Michael Lewis
#79. Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.
Michael Lewis
#80. Several days later he'd worked his way back to the late 1800s. The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants.
Michael Lewis
#81. 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
#82. He lifted his shirt, and on his back was the White Rabbit, wearing his waistcoat and looking at his watch. It was just like the illustration from the book. Only standing next to him, back-to-back, was another White Rabbit wearing a leather motercycle jacket and boots and smoking a cigar.
Michael Thomas Ford
#83. People threw around when they wanted the conversation to end, and for brains to go dead, and for all questioning to cease.
Michael Lewis
#84. Whatever that guy is buying, I want to short it.
Michael Lewis
#85. A lot of what people did and said when they "predicted" things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure".
Michael Lewis
#86. My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.
Michael Lewis
#87. We knew that in general the quality of treatment we received in the training class varied inversely with the desirability of the job held by the speaker. In this there was a lesson: To get the best job, you had to weather the most abuse.
Michael Lewis
#88. First base was a far richer social opportunity. First base made catching feeling like a bad dinner party - what with the ump hanging on your shoulder and all the fans and cameras staring at you. At first base you could really talk.
Michael Lewis
#89. The effect on James of being ignored by the people who stood to benefit the most from his work was to distance himself even further from those people.
Michael Lewis
#90. Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer.
Michael Ondaatje
#91. 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
#92. I was gonna put him on the bus ... I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.
Michael Lewis
#93. There was a vividly clear class distinction between tech guys and finance guys. The finance guys saw the tech guys as faceless help and were unable to think of them as anything else.
Michael Lewis
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Why pay $20 million to Harrison Ford? I don't even understand that. They think they have to do it ... If someone puts a price on himself, that suggests he is irreplaceable, then he better find somewhere else to work.
Michael Lewis
#97. I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?
Michael Lewis
#98. 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
#99. It's one thing to bet on red or black and know that you are betting on red or black. It's another to bet on a form of red and not to know it.
Michael Lewis
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