Michael Lewis Quotes

You want loyalty, hire a cocker spaniel.

Automated voices and the bells from the row of testing machines in the back. The walls were white cinder block, the floors speckled linoleum. At the front desk were four large black ladies. Leigh Anne...

Fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.

Fourth risk: the electrical grid. The river and its tributaries generate more than 40 percent of the hydroelectric power for the United States; were the dams to fail, the effects would be catastrophic...

Lot of that money went to big grain producers. The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversati...

The knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it.

We are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.

A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins’ linemen put it,...

After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one's perception of another, in relation to everyone else?

After that, the men in the room rushed for the exits, apparently to sell their shares in Bear Stearns. By the time Alan Greenspan arrived to speak, there was hardly anyone who cared to hear what he ha...

Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice.

First, when all investors were doing the same thing, he would actively seek to do the opposite. The word stockbrokers use for this approach is contrarian. Everyone wants to be one, but no one is, for...

For a technology company to succeed, he argued, it needed always to be looking to destroy itself. If it didn’t, someone else would.

How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation?

It actually went pretty well, until they got onto the topic of marijuana. So you got caught smoking weed your freshman and sophomore years, said the Rockets interviewer. What happened your junior year...

It was as if this baseball coach had reached inside me, found a rusty switch marked: 'turn on before attempting use' - and flipped it.

People often work hard to obtain information they already have

So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value.

The general idea was to sell their software first to rich technophiles and then, gradually, infiltrate the minds of the middle-class owners of suburban tract houses.