"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."
Quote collection
Michael Lewis quotes (page 4 of 7)
129 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold."
"The reason the Greeks don't pay taxes is they don't trust where their taxes are going, because they know these other Greeks are taking money from the state for doing nothing. So it's - it's an essentially corrupt society."
"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 incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong."
"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."
"Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . ."
"Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book."
"In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt."
"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."
"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."
"There used to be this guy called Vinny who worked on the floor of the stock exchange, said one big investor who had observed the market for a long time. After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir"
"There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?"
"Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly."
"Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market."
"The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged."
"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."
"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."
"the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual."
"That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different."
"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."