Michael Lewis > Quotes

“At the height of the Vietnam War, a coal miner was nearly as likely to be killed on the job as an American soldier in uniform was to die in combat, and far more likely to be injured.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“Why am I spending another minute of my life reading about and yapping about Donald Trump when I know nothing about the 2 million or so federal employees and their possibly lifesaving work that the president is intent on eliminating?”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), the lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“The new enemy of the Enlightenment doesn’t believe in any kind of verities beyond personal feeling and experience. It has no use for statistics or numbers or data. It doesn’t hold any truths to be self-evident.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“That’s because you cannot trust Americans to take only their slice of the American Dream. Many Americans want the whole dream, and then they want to sell it back to the rest of us at an extremely marked-up price.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“The "false narrative" and "obtuse political talking points" around the IRS's criminal investigations depress him. He wishes more people knew about the work Koopman and his agents really do -- these tireless, dedicated people, working all hours, shutting down suppliers of fentanyl, saving kids, disrupting terrorists...Oh, and as a byproduct of that work, making cryptocurrency a safer space for all those libertarians who hate the IRS, so that they can go get rich without being ripped off.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service

“joining the civil service is basically like being in the Witness Protection Program: “No one ever knows about the good you do.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“The misery index is the unemployment rate plus inflation. At the time Okun devised it, the index stood at 8.12. In the intervening years, it has fluctuated between a high of 21.98 under Jimmy Carter in June 1980 and a low of 5.06 under Barack Obama in September 2015.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“Since some of his relatives were vacationing in nearby Michigan, he (Danny Werfel) decided to drive up for a reunion. And (he's) thinking, All these roads are in great condition! The quality of life we have, it's all government. Government touches you a hundred times before breadfast, and you don't even know it.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service

“Early on, Alexander taught me the importance of a strong exterior. ‘I learned a while ago,’ he said, ‘that there was no point to showing weakness. When you arrive at 6:30am, having had no sleep the night before, and having lost your best friend in a car accident, and some big-swinging dick walks over to your desk, slaps you on the back, and says, ‘How the hell are you?’ You don’t say, ‘I’m really tired and really upset.’ You say, ‘I’m great! How the hell are you?”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“This work has, among other things, led to the rescue of 23 children from rape and assault, the seizure of a quarter-million child abuse videos, and the arrest of 370 alleged pedophiles. It has resulted in the largest-ever seizure of cryptocurrency headed to Hamas, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. When Changpeng Zhao, chief of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, reported to prison in June, it was because Koopman’s small cybercrime team had uncovered evidence of the firm’s money laundering for terrorists and sanctions-busting for Iran, Syria and Russia. In the past 10 years, this work has returned more than $12 billion to victims of crime and to the U.S. Treasury. If he worked anywhere else, Koopman would probably be celebrated. But he’s employed by the Internal Revenue Service, the arm of government that even its commissioner, Danny Werfel, describes as “iconically unpopular.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“His early cases were white-collar crimes such as investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. “I’m 20 years old, sitting across the table from people in their 80s who are crying because they’ve trusted someone with their hard-earned retirement savings, and they’ve lost everything. You want to get the person responsible for that.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“But as Mark Twain said: “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“Writers write the words, but readers decide their meaning.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“We are stewards of resources that belong to the American people”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“His agency is one of the world’s leading experts on death, but he is an expert on how to live.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“In management-speak, Walters loves the Baldrige criteria, named for President Ronald Reagan’s commerce secretary Malcolm Baldrige Jr., which focus on seven categories of performance: leadership; strategy; customers; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; workforce; operations; and results. In total quality terms, Walters is big on the “PDCA cycle,” implementing Plan-Do-Check-Act at every scale of his operation, from the height of the grass to the annual budget.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it. People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure. But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

“[...] poszukując podstawowego smutku, nie zauważają kulturowego znaczenia faktu, że ich badani różnicują to, co robią, kiedy są smutni (to znaczy podejmują aktywność), od tego, co ich zdaniem w takiej sytuacji robią inni (to znaczy popadają w apatię). Tłumaczą tę różnicę jako skutek zniekształcenia poznawczego. Nie wyjaśniają mechanizmu kryjącego się za tym zniekształceniem, polegającego na tym, że projektujemy "złą" bierną reakcję na innych, a sobie przypisujemy "dobrą", aktywną reakcję; [...].”
― Michael Lewis

“By then there was a long and growing list of pundits who claimed they predicted the catastrophe, but a far shorter list of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet on their vision. 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, The Big Short: Wie eine Handvoll Trader die Welt verzockte

“Early on, Alexander taught me the importance of a strong exterior. ‘I learned a while ago,’ he said, ‘that there was no point to showing weakness. When you arrive at 6:30am, having had no sleep the night before, and having lost your best friend in a car accident, and some big-swinging dick walks over to your desk, slaps you on the back, and says ‘how the hell are you,’ you don’t say, ‘I’m really tired and really upset,’ you say, ‘I’m great, how the hell are you?”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“Managing a pandemic was like driving a weird car that only accelerated, or braked, fifteen seconds after you hit the pedal. “Or think of looking at a star,” he said. “It’s the same thing. The light you see is from years ago. When you are looking at a disease, the disease you are seeing is from last week.”
― Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

“Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck- and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to unlucky.”
― Michael Lewis

“Since some of his relatives were vacationing in nearby Michigan, he (Danny Werfel) decided to drive up for a reunion. And (he's) thinking, All these roads are in great condition! The quality of life we have, it's all government. Government touches you a hundred times before breakfast, and you don't even know it.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service

“Zacznijmy od smutku jako czynnika motywującego do poszukiwania pomocy. To, że smutna osoba nie zawsze otrzymuje pomoc, której potrzebuj,e a niekiedy nawet odstręcza innych, wydaje się zagadkowe. W społeczeństwach mniej indywidualistycznych niż nasze często dostrzega się bardziej jednorodne oczekiwanie, że smutni człowiek wzbudzi współczucie i uzyska wsparcie.”
― Michael Lewis

“Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces?”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Unabridged edition

“(about information in the markets) Those who say don't know, and those know don't say.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“…The word stock brokers used for this approach is ‘contrarian’. Everyone wants to be one, but no one is, for the sad reason that most investors are scared of looking foolish. Investors don’t fear losing money as much as they fear solitude, by which I mean taking risks that others avoid. When they’re caught losing money alone, they have no excuse for their mistake, and most investors, like most people, need excuses. They are, strangely enough, happy to stand on the edge of a precipice, as long as they’re joined by a few thousand others.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“Get rid of that idea, and we would be abandoning the Enlightenment and the ambitions for progress that came with it. We would enter a new philosophical anti-system. Call it the Darkening. Let’s not give in to it without a fight.”
― Michael Lewis, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service