Michael Lewis > Quotes

“Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

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

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

“He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“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 Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“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: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.”
― Michael Lewis, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game

“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

“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: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“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

“From the snap of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five.

and Lawrence Taylor (fearless tackle) WE all have fears, we all have fears!!”
― Michael Lewis, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

“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?”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“foodstuffs absolved of the obligation to provide vitamins and minerals cavorted with reckless abandon.”
― Michael Lewis

“Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.”
― Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

“There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss," he said, "was what not to do: beat up a kid. It's easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.”
― Michael Lewis, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game

“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

“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 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: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“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

“Make It Happen”
― Michael Lewis

“What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, "too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“...[H]uman beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance... Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him... When faced with abundance, the brain's ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress. In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.”
― Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

“...a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.”
― Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

“If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“What happens when we acknowledge the sovereignty and power of God without trusting in His goodness and faithfulness? A pitcher who saw God's power behind his extremely unlikely rise to the big leagues wondered if, at any difficulty he encountered there, God might be taking his ability away.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“Investment bankers make money for a living.”
― Michael Lewis

“I have this theory," says Andy Stone, seated in his office at Prudential-Bache Securities. "Wall Street makes its best producers into
managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a
manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often
neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers, and they go
after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that
producing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers.
Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get
muscled out because of politics. The guys left behind are just the most
ruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street—why
Salomon Brothers is getting crunched now—because the ruthless people
are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“Donnie Green himself had been a trader at Salomon Brothers in the dark ages, when traders had more hair on their chests than on their heads.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, writers, musicians, and on and on and on.”
― Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

“Jules Tygiel’s Past Time: Baseball As History”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“In the book “The Blind Side” they are talking about the most important job in the NFL (Lewis). The most important job is the job of the left tackle he is there to protect the quarterback’s blindside. People don’t see the left tackle’s job as any more important as the right tackle but the truth is that without a good left tackle most quarterbacks would be injured. The left tackle has to have a certain figure with big wide legs long arms big hands and very fast feet (Lewis 37-38). When the left tackle is on the field, he is supposed to be able to see the quarterback and the guy trying to get the quarterback. The left tackles have to figure out their own way to keep anybody from running around them. Therefor this shows that they need to be able to do whatever they need to protect the quarterback.”
― Michael Lewis

“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, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“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, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“The relationship between the people and their money in California is such that you can pluck almost any city at random and enter a crisis. San Jose has the highest per capita income of any city in the United States, after New York. It has the highest credit rating of any city in California with a population over 250,000. It is one of the few cities in America with a triple-A rating from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, but only because its bondholders have the power to compel the city to levy a tax on property owners to pay off the bonds. The city itself is not all that far from being bankrupt.”
― Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

“The simple measure of sanity in housing prices, Zelman argued, was the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, in the United States, it ran around 3:1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally, to 4:1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” says Zelman. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was four to one. In Los Angeles it was ten to one and in Miami, eight-point-five to one.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine