Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Lewis

People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is right.

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.

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.

The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.

There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.

My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.

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.

There are several insights at the heart of the A's system that I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it's a team game. That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to your team, so for god's sake don't go blow a quarter of your budget on one guy.

The Oakland clubhouse is a wonderful place. A lot of these guys feel like rejects. They were rejects and they feel - they can tell you how baseball screwed up.

I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

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.

The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can't go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.

If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it.

The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.

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.

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.

Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.

A vast industry of stockbrokers, financial planners, and investment advisers skims a fortune for themselves off the top in exchange for passing their clients' money on to people who, as a whole, cannot possibly outperform the market.

The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident.

When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.

Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors, including teachers' attitudes. Moreover, girls avoid situations in which failure is likely, whereas boys approach such situations as a challenge, indicating that failure differentially affects self-esteem.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me me as totally preposterous-which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from.

In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.

Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.

The idea that it's smart to allow Wall Street firms, with this "too big to fail" imprimatur, to become hedge funds again - it's unconscionable. You're essentially saying we're going to take some elites in our society and let them roll the bones in the marketplace, and if it works out they get rich, and if it doesn't work out the taxpayer comes in again. That seems absolutely crazy to me. That seems to be where they're headed. I mean, maybe they're not and I'm wrong. Maybe they'll do sensible things. It's hard to know! There doesn't seem to be a plan.

People really don't like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. 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.

One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.

When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.

If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.

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.

We change for the good so long as good exists around us.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.

People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.

All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.

Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.

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.

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.

A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term.

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.

People were paid lots of money to make stupid decisions, people in big banks, and when people are paid to be stupid they'll be stupid. The question was, did they know they were being stupid or were they just stupid? I think you need to take it on a case by case basis. There was some sinister activity, but I think by and by it was people being incentivised to do the wrong thing.

The incentive for the outsider is to attack the system right up to the moment he is co-opted by it. The incentive for the insider -and this took some getting used to- is to allow yourself to be attacked, and then co-opt your most ferocious attackers, and their best ideas. The effect on the system as a whole is to make it more stable, because everyone winds up working on its behalf.

Just because you've been successful and just because you've disrupted an environment, doesn't mean you're a role model or that you actually have anything to teach anybody. There's an awful lot of luck and accident in the world, and maybe you were just on the receiving end of that.

We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.

As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.

Commitment, by its nature, frees us from ourselves and, while it stands us in opposition to some, it joins us with others similarly committed. Commitment moves us from the mirror trap of the self absorbed with the self to the freedom of a community of shared values.

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.

Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.

The thing I'm most afraid of is what happens when these people who voted for Donald Trump realize he's not going to do anything for them and that he's not an antidote to what ails them. His whole movement runs on anger, and if it doesn't have anger, it doesn't go anywhere.

He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.

Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them-to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch.

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.

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 the unlucky.