Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Pennies
Mexican
California
Income
Picker
English
Strawberry
Needed
Lent
House
Strawberries
Every
Penny

More quotes by Michael Lewis

Image
People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.
Michael Lewis
Image
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 have anything to teach anybody. There's an awful lot of luck and accident in the world, and maybe you were just on the receiving end of that.
Michael Lewis
Image
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
Image
The incentives are still rotten, and people are still paid to do things they shouldn't be doing. The reforms did not really address the incentives, the system is still dysfunctional and there are still behavioural issues that need to be addressed.
Michael Lewis
Image
I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.
Michael Lewis
Image
They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.
Michael Lewis
Image
The Germans made just about every bad investment you could have made in the last 10 years. They invested in Icelandic banks. They invested in Greek government bonds. They were heavy into Irish banks, big into Irish banks, and they bought U.S. subprime mortgage bonds.
Michael Lewis
Image
Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient, Said Palmer. The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.
Michael Lewis
Image
Like Adam, formed from clay, children are formed from the biological material of which they are made or by the hands of their parents.
Michael Lewis
Image
Time and space are absolute. Diseases are evil spirits that inhabit the body. Parallel lines never meet. The earth is the center of the universe. Children are miniature adults. At one time in history each of these beliefs was generally held to be true. Each, however, gave way to different ideas and even different world views.
Michael Lewis
Image
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
Image
Icelandic people are inbred. And they have a sense of themselves as genetically special, and a history of risk-taking because they make their living on the high seas fishing. Assets generally rose in value during this period, and so it looked like they actually knew what they were doing.
Michael Lewis
Image
It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.
Michael Lewis
Image
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
Image
He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.
Michael Lewis
Image
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
Image
People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.
Michael Lewis
Image
As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.
Michael Lewis
Image
I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me me as totally preposterous-which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from.
Michael Lewis
Image
A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.
Michael Lewis