Michael Lewis Quotes

The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.

~ Michael Lewis

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

~ Michael Lewis

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

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

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

~ Michael Lewis

Danny explained, “Reforms always create winners and losers, and the losers will always fight harder than the winners.” How did you get the losers to accept change? The prevailing strategy on the Israeli farms – which wasn’t working very well – was to bully or argue with the people who needed to change. The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it, Danny told the students. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced,” he said, “and in the other it is increased.” And that was a sort of proof that there was an advantage in reducing the tensions. “It’s a key idea,” said Danny. “Making it easy to change.

~ Michael Lewis

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

~ Michael Lewis

Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do it twice.

~ Michael Lewis

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 nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.

~ Michael Lewis

...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

The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?” says one trader still at Salomon. “That’s easy. Strauss wouldn’t stoop to use the men’s room on the trading floor. He’d go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.

~ Michael Lewis

It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it’s amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no story involving Arabs could ever be refuted. So if you didn’t know why the dollar was falling, you shouted out something about Arabs.

~ Michael Lewis

He shouted into the phone, “That is fuckin’ awesome. I mean fuckin’ awesome. I fuckin’ mean fucking awesome. You are one Big Swinging Dick, and don’t ever let anybody tell you different.” It brought tears to my eyes to hear it, to be called a Big Swinging Dick by the man who, years ago, had given birth to the distinction and in my mind had the greatest right to confer it upon me.

~ Michael Lewis

Buy potatoes,” he said. “Gotta hop.” Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them.

~ Michael Lewis

A man got to have a code. - Omar Little

~ Michael Lewis

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

~ Michael Lewis

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

~ Michael Lewis

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

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.

~ Michael Lewis

And [Thaler] noticed that when he had his fellow economists to dinner, they filled up on cashews, which meant they had less appetite for the meal. More to the point, he noticed that they tended to be relieved when he removed the cashew nuts, so they didn't ruin their dinners. The idea that it could make you better off to reduce your choices—that idea was alien to economics.

~ Michael Lewis

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.

~ Michael Lewis

We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle.

~ Michael Lewis

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.

~ Michael Lewis

Holding one's self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor. The degree to which the stigma is socially apparent is the degree to which one must negotiate the issue of blame, not only for one's self but between one's self and the other who is witness to the stigma. Stigmatization is a much more powerful elicitor of shame and guilt in that it requires a negotiation not only between one's self and one's attributions, but between one's self and the attributions of others.

~ Michael Lewis

The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence.

~ Michael Lewis

The markets in the long run are no doubt driven by fundamental economic laws—if the United States runs a persistent trade deficit, the dollar will eventually plummet—but in the short run money flows less rationally. Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.

~ Michael Lewis

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

~ Michael Lewis

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

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

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

~ Michael Lewis

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

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.

~ Michael Lewis

Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]

~ Michael Lewis

I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed.

~ Michael Lewis