Best 174 quotes of Michael Lewis on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

At SGI board meetings... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.

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.

Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.

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.

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.

Donald Trump got almost 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton! He happened to get more in some of the right places. It was just like one of those things where a stock going up and people impose a false sense of order on it. It's really more intellectually honestly viewed as a disorderly process.

Don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them.

Each firm held its rope; one by one, they realized that no matter how strongly they pulled, the balloon would eventually lift them off their feet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

He's a machine for competitive balance, ... Yes, the money is in New York. Yes, the money is in his hands. But he squanders money. Thank God for it.

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.

Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with it.

I always find with my stories that the way they start is that I just get so interested in a person that I'm compelled to go back to them over and over until I learn more and more about them, without even quite thinking it's material for a book.

Icelandic people are inbred. And they have a sense of themselves as genetically special, and a history of risk-taking because they make their living on the high seas fishing. Assets generally rose in value during this period, and so it looked like they actually knew what they were doing.

I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.

I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.

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.

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.

If you have a patient in a doctor's office who's just been told they have terminal cancer but there's this operation they could perform right now that might save their lives. ... They have a 90 percent chance of surviving the operation — if you tell them that, they respond one way. If you tell them ... that they have a 10 percent chance of being killed by the operation, they are about three times less likely to have the operation.

If you're the kind of kid who thinks that all that's important in life is making money, Wall Street is probably still the place to go, especially now that Trump's elected.

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

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.

Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it.

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.

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

I procrastinate to a point where I'm filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It's usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.

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

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.

It is far better to keep the enemy close, by bribing him with stock options, than to have him out in the wild, foraging.

It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.

It's such a pain in the ass to write a book, I can't imagine writing one if I'm not interested in the subject.

I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.

I was really interested in a pretty simple thing: what happens when someone tries to introduce moral considerations into Wall Street, what happens when someone wants to actually demand of himself and those who work with him that what they do is not just profitable but good and useful.

Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.

Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.

Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions.