Michael Lewis Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”
-- Michael LewisSource : "Moneyball". Book by Michael Lewis, June 17, 2003.
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“I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“We have the Google family calendar. Before a week starts, my wife and I sit down to decide who's driving who to school or when can we go out on a date.”
-- Michael Lewis -
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“The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.”
-- 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 -
“There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.”
-- Michael Lewis -
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“He's a machine for competitive balance, ... Yes, the money is in New York. Yes, the money is in his hands. But he squanders money. Thank God for it.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,”
-- Michael Lewis -
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“If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.”
-- 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 -
“Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term.”
-- Michael LewisSource : Michael Lewis (2015). “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (movie tie-in)”, p.46, W. W. Norton & Company
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“Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.”
-- Michael LewisSource : Michael Lewis (2015). “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (movie tie-in)”, p.105, W. W. Norton & Company
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“Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them-to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors, including teachers' attitudes. Moreover, girls avoid situations in which failure is likely, whereas boys approach such situations as a challenge, indicating that failure differentially affects self-esteem.”
-- Michael Lewis -
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“Some coaches believed they could judge a player's performance simply by watching it. In this they were deeply mistaken. The naked eye was an inadequate tool for learning what you needed to know to evaluate baseball players and baseball games. Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. The difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is simply not visible-it is a matter of record”
-- Michael Lewis -
“Thirdly-but not lastly-there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen. The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw. There was a lot you couldn't see when you watched a game”
-- Michael Lewis -
“He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .”
-- Michael Lewis -
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“In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“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.”
-- Michael Lewis -
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“I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.”
-- Michael Lewis -
“He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.”
-- Michael Lewis
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