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Portrait of Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis

(1960) Journalist

398 quotes in 1087 categories

Michael Lewis’s 398 reflections capture his knack for turning real‑world events into compelling narratives. Expect a blend of investigative curiosity and clear‑cut observations that make complex topics feel surprisingly approachable.

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Michael Lewis is a journalist, best known for The big short: inside the doomsday machine.

Quick Facts About Michael Lewis

Born: October 15, 1960
Profession: Journalist
Notable works: The big short: inside the doomsday machine

About Michael Lewis

Michael Monroe Lewis is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. He is known for his nonfiction work, particularly his coverage of financial crises and behavioral finance.

Biography source: Wikipedia

Quotes by Michael Lewis

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

Banking

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“Shining a light creates shadows,”

Light

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“doctors don’t think probabilities apply to their patients,”

Doctor

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

Investing

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

Change

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“They end when the career ends,”

Career

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“Don't worry where I am. I'll tell you when I get there.”

Fear

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“orator Isocrates: “Democracy destroys itself”

Democracy

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“Why do you always answer a question with another question?” “Clarity,” he said.”

Answer

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“We tried to trademark proximity, but you can’t because it’s a word,”

Proximity

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

Crisis

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“How important could the sound it made be, if no one was able to hear it?”

Important

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“we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.”

Punished

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“That was the reason the casino bothered to list the wheel’s most recent spins: to help gamblers to delude themselves.”

Gamblers

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Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

Affection

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“People often work hard to obtain information they already have”

Data

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“Fair enough, Gutfreund had once been a trader, but that was as relevant as an old woman's claim that she was once…

Woman Claim

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“Danny sensed already that he was very like his mother and not at all like his father. His feelings about himself were…

Parenting

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

Bad thing

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The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was…

America

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“Baseball—of all things—was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method. As”

Baseball

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“Donnie Green himself had been a trader at Salomon Brothers in the dark ages, when traders had more hair on their chests…

Dark ages

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If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series,…

Baseball

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

Adam

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“You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything…

Bias

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“The company tied white and yellow and red ribbons to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After…

Business

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Just because you've been successful and just because you've disrupted an environment, doesn't mean you're a role model or that you actually…

Accidents

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“The price volatility within each trading day in the U.S. stock market between 2010 and 2013 was nearly 40 percent higher than…

Customer

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“My interest in psychology was as a way to do philosophy,” he said. “To understand the world by understanding why people, especially…

God exists

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“The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut…

Decision makers

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The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks…

Appearance

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“Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. “Yes . . . and” rather than “No . . . but.”…

Doing things

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“On its surface, the booming market in side bets on subprime mortgage bonds seemed to be the financial equivalent of fantasy football:…

Ball player

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“Belief in the Law of Small Numbers” teased out the implications of a single mental error that people commonly made—even when those…

Faith

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“Then came the so-called flash crash. At 2:45 on May 6, 2010, for no obvious reason, the market fell six hundred points…

Investing

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“In America, even the homeless were profligate. Back in Toronto, after a big bank dinner, Brad would gather the leftovers into covered…

Every day

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“Weirdly—but as Danny and Amos had suspected—the further the winning number was from the number on a person's lottery ticket, the less…

Lottery

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“When the Goldman Sachs saleswoman called Mike Burry and told him that her firm would be happy to sell him credit default…

Aig

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“The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any…

Customer

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“...[H]uman beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment…

Chocolate cake

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Michael Lewis by topic

Customer (72) Investing (56) Wall street (51) People (35) Baseball (30) Money (29) Wall St (25) Thinking (17) Life (16) Wall (13) Streets (13) Recession (13) Psychology (12) Way (11) Football (11) Books (10) World (9) Time (9) Management (9) Economics (9) Success (8) Stock market (8) Mortgage-bonds (8) Mind (8) Ifs (8)