Michael Lewis Quotes

You could argue the banks are much better capitalised than they were going into the crisis, and everyone's in a much more vigilant state because they still remember the crisis.

Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.

All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers.

My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.

When the last history of high-frequency trading is written, Hunsader, like Joe Saluzzi and Sal Arnuk of Themis Trading, deserves a prominent place in 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.

You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before.

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

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.

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.

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.

The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy football bears to the NFL.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged.

Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?

People in the voting booth are not purely rational creatures any more than they're purely rational creatures outside the voting booth.

I'd say part of the appeal of Trump is that he's presenting himself as a totally certain, infallible person.

There's no point in arguing with partisan supporters. Their views are their identity. Nothing you can tell the most phlegmatic follower.

Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.

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.

Every form of strength is also a form of weakness.

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

He was the guy who always won the game of chicken because his opponents suspected he might actually enjoy a head-on collision.

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 triple of Jeremy Brown's imagination, in reality, is a home run.

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours

A man got to have a code. - Omar Little

foodstuffs absolved of the obligation to provide vitamins and minerals cavorted with reckless abandon.

The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, "too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, ' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, " Amos liked to say. "Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

The way it feels to me, ' he said, 'is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them.

On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess.

Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.

Those who say don't know, those who know don't say