Michael Lewis is an American author and financial journalist known for writing several bestselling books to include ‘Moneyball’ and ‘The Big Short.’ As a critic of the financial industry, here is a look at some of the most influential Michael Lewis quotes ever documented.
“A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.”
“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.”
“Don’t worry where I am. I’ll tell you when I get there.”
“Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich.”
“Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.”
“Germans longed to be near shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.”
“He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.”
“He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.”
“He would never again let the market dictate the direction of his life.”
Tonight on @PBS, author Michael Lewis introduces "The Undoing Project." pic.twitter.com/kWYIg4Cur7
— Charlie Rose Show (@CharlieRoseShow) December 7, 2016
“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.”
“I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else’s boat or you’ll regret in in the morning.”
“I was gonna put him on the bus…I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.”
“In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”
“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient.”
“No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money you can’t afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones.”
“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.”
“Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.”
Michael Lewis will talk about his new book, THE UNDOING PROJECT, tonight on @colbertlateshow. pic.twitter.com/lEdtekDqMl
— W. W. Norton (@wwnorton) December 5, 2016
“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. ”
“Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.”
“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.”
“That’s what happens when you’re thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.”
“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.”
“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. ”
“The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.”
“The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.”
Michael Lewis is such great writer it makes me angry. Guess I am just jealous.#michael Lewis pic.twitter.com/ZsJ2Ut9hgu
— Matthew Fagan (@fagan_nj) November 26, 2016
“The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Those who know don’t tell and those who tell don’t know.”
“Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.”
“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?”
“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.”
“What happens when we acknowledge the sovereignty and power of God without trusting in His goodness and faithfulness?”
“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.”
Here is a one on one with Christine Lagarde as she sits down with Michael Lewis.
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