Michael Lewis quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Michael Lewis on Wise Famous Quotes.

Dont worry about where i am , i'll let you know when i get there .

These Ginnie Maes suck. They get longer [in maturity] when rates go up, and shorter when rates go down, and nobody wants them

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

In the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative the conclusion we draw therefrom ... .

How many people can pick up a book and find an instruction manual for their life?

This conceit went hand in glove with the investment bankers' belief that they could control their destiny, which, as we shall see, they couldn't.

If you're in a business where you can do only one thing and it doesn't work out, it's hard for your bosses to be mad at you.

Silicon Valley in the late 1990s was the closest that business has ever come to resembling a child's chemistry experiment.

Engineers created the wealth. And during the 1990s Silicon Valley had created a fantastic amount of new wealth.

Amos had wanted to be a poet when he was a boy. He'd wound up a scientist. Danny was a poet, who somehow happened to have become a scientist.

The nice thing about things that are urgent," he liked to say, "is that if you wait long enough they aren't urgent anymore." "I

how can a man who doesn't speak English lie

It's the idea that is a tiny push away from general acceptance and, when it gets that push, will change the world. The

There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.

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

Guys who can't get a job on Wall Street get a job at Moody's, as one Goldman Sachs trader-turned-hedge fund manager put it.

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

Because his memory is so selective, he has no scars from prior experience, said Vinny.

The professors argued that Netscape courted disaster from the start, by taunting Microsoft. Mooning the Giant

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

Never was a man's love of risk so beautifully amplified by his environment as Clark's was in Silicon Valley.

The programmers decided the steps everyone on board Hyperion would need to take to do everything from dimming the lights to raising the sails.

Did I think I was doing God's work?" he said later. "No. But I did think market efficiency was something important for the economy.

rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine

The members of Hyperion's crew were now pigs, for a very simple reason: they all had a stake in Clark's Internet businesses.

In the Valley. The power is shifting to the engineers who create the companies.

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos

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.

He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.

The great thing about baseball players, from the point of view of personal hygiene, is how seldom they break a sweat.

The training program wasn't a survival course, but sometimes a person came through who put the horrors of 41 into perspective.

A man who can tell a good story can make a good living as a broker.

The exercise was meant to illustrate the powerful instinct people have for finding causes for any effect, and also for creating narratives. "The

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

Shining a light creates shadows,

I recall that one of the first investment bankers I met taught me a poem. God gave you eyes, plagiarize. A

A Home without Equity Is Just a Rental with Debt,

And so it went in football. The game attracted the very people most likely to get in trouble outside

Much is made of a kind heart," he said. "I'm more of a feed-yourself-or-die kind of guy.

Eisman was quick to see narratives, he explained the world in stories, and this was one of the stories he used to explain himself. The

Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it.

But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.

Bond people pose the same problem to a cultural anthropologist as a non-literate tribe deep in the Amazon. In

People threw around when they wanted the conversation to end, and for brains to go dead, and for all questioning to cease.

The source of his unhappiness was, as usual, other people.

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

He's sort of a prick in a way, but he's smart and honest and fearless." "Even

When we walked down the aisle, they played Taco Bell's Canyon, Quinn says knowingly. (Named for its German composer, Johann TacoBell.)

When he spoke to people in the flesh, he could never tell what had put them off, his message or his person.

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.

He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.

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.

Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.

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.

Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.

Rivals accused Whitney of being overrated; bloggers accused her of being lucky. What she was, mainly, was right.

Capitalism's machinery favored these capitalists as it had never favored anyone else in its history.

And who would deny that the consumer demand for ever more stuff at ever cheaper prices is one of the great deterministic forces in history?

Only someone who has Asperger's would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus,

East Germans are the Greeks of Germany," I say. "Be careful," she says.

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

People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions.

Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn't mean it wasn't a good book. It was a very good book.

From the end of 2005 until the middle of 2007, Wall Street firms created somewhere between $200 and $400 billion in subprime-backed CDOs: No

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

The man who groped for the new new thing was in many ways ill suited for mainstream business.

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

Wall Street paid the most for what I could do, which was nothing.

The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.

If it doesn't happen, it never was going to happen. If you never did it, it wasn't there to begin with.

It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what's in them must be invented." What

What was the secret to dealing with the assholes? "Lift weights or learn karate," said O'Grady.

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

The difference between a great software guy and an okay software guy is huge. A great software guy is worth ten times an okay software guy.

If everyone on Wall Street abided by the rule's spirit, the rule would have established a new fairness in the U.S. stock market.

He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.

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

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

I really do believe the final act in play is a crisis in our financial institutions, which are doing such dumb, dumb things,

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

You want loyalty, hire a cocker spaniel.

These days the investment bankers came to Silicon Valley.

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

By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface. "It

Investing well was all about being paid the right price for risk.

Goliath, dissatisfied with his size advantage, has bought David's sling.

We tried to trademark proximity, but you can't because it's a word,

Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?

Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.

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

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

There is nothing more satisfying to me," he said, "than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it.

This gorgeous financial myopia was common in the Valley, and one of the chief sources of its success.

Nothing short of the U.S. government could save them.

A new trader could leap into a market and trade frantically inside it without adding anything of value to it.

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

The way the creative process works is that .you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.

One piece of bad luck was rapid technical change, which was a weapon that oddball upstarts could use against the enormous gray corporations.