Michael Lewis > Quotes

“Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball

“The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.”
― Michael M. Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient," Said Palmer. " The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball

“What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.”
― Michael Lewis, The Blind Side

“Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World

“Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .”
― Michael M. Lewis, Panic!: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

“The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball

“Courage is a hard thing to figure. You can have courage based on a dumb idea or mistake, but you're not supposed to question adults, or your coach or your teacher, because they make the rules. Maybe they know best, but maybe they don't. It all depends on who you are, where you come from. Didn't at least one of the six hundred guys think about giving up, and joining with the other side? I mean, valley of death that's pretty salty stuff. That's why courage it's tricky. Should you always do what others tell you to do? Sometimes you might not even know why you're doing something. I mean any fool can have courage. But honor, that's the real reason for you either do something or you don't. It's who you are and maybe who you want to be. If you die trying for something important, then you have both honor and courage, and that's pretty good. I think that's what the writer was saying, that you should hope for courage and try for honor. And maybe even pray that the people telling you what to do have some, too.”
― Michael Lewis, The Blind Side

“It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Amos said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.”
― Michael M. Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.”
― Michael Lewis

“Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“If you challenge conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.

Bill James”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball

“When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World

“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, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

“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

“That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“The way the creative process works is that you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“Don't worry where I am. I'll tell you when I get there.”
― Michael Lewis, The Blind Side

“The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball