Top 549 Quotes & Sayings by Charlie Munger
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American businessman Charlie Munger.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
I regard the bitcoin craze as totally asinine to create some manufactured currency.
Alternatives to gold and currency and to make a big speculative vehicle - I never considered for one second having anything to do with it. I detested it the minute it had been raised.
Economics profession, they've been - they've been confident in various formulas, but economics is not physics. The same formula that works in one decade doesn't work in the next. Economics is a difficult subject.
Gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but I think civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.
I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn't understand both is a damned fool.
The perfect example of Darwinism is what technology has done to businesses.
I love when I think we're taking territory - if it makes sense in the long term, we just don't give a damn what it looks like in the short term. After all, we're running a cult, not a normal company.
They made a mistake. And it was an easy mistake to make. I don't regard setting incentives aggressively as a mistake. I think the mistake was, when the bad news came, they didn't recognize it directly. I don't think that impairs the future of Wells Fargo. They'll be better for it.
The first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.
You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies.
If you can get really good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.
That's the last thing on Earth you should think about... There's just a whole lot of things that aren't going to work for you. Figure out what they are and avoid them like the plague. And one of them is bitcoin... It is total insanity.
I will say this: I know no wise person who doesn't read a lot. I suspect that you can read on the computer now and get a lot of benefit out of it, but I doubt that it'll work as well as reading print worked for me.
If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change.
Most people don't grab the right ideas or don't know what to do with them.
It's a real pleasure to earn the trust of your customers slowly over time by doing what's right.
People are trying to be smart - all I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it's harder than most people think.
Everyone has the idea of owning good companies. The problem is that they have high prices in relations to assets and earnings, and that takes all of the fun out of the game.
If you're glued together right and honorable, you will succeed. Get in there and get rid of stupidities and avoid bad people. Try teaching that to your grandchildren. The best way is by example. Fix yourself.
I'm a great admirer of the Trump change of mind about China and making an ally out of China instead of screaming about their trade.
A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.
It is one thing to think gold has some marvelous store of value because man has no way of inventing more gold or getting it very easily, so it has the advantage of rarity. Believe me, man is capable of somehow creating more bitcoin... They tell you there are rules and they can't do it. Don't believe them.
Wells Fargo had a glitch - the truth of the matter is they made a business judgement that was wrong. I don't think anything is fundamentally wrong.
I'm proud to be associated with the value system at Berkshire Hathaway; I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad.
When someone takes their existing business and tries to transform it into something else - they fail. In technology that is often the case. Look at Kodak: it was the dominant imaging company in the world. They did fabulously during the great depression, but then wiped out the shareholders because of technological change.
I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right.
Who would want one's children growing up buying things like bitcoin? I hope to God my family doesn't buy it. It's noxious poison.
I've got some advice for the young: If you've got anything you really want to do, don't wait until you're 93.
Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.
If any successes has come to me, it came because I insisted on thinking things through. That's all I was capable of doing in life, was thinking pretty hard about trying to get the right answer, and then acting on it. I never learned to do anything else.
I think people who multitask pay a huge price. They think they're being extra productive, and I think when you multitask so much you don't have time to think about anything deeply, you are giving the world an advantage you shouldn't do, and practically everybody is drifting into that mistake.
It's remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading.
I believe Costco does more for civilization than the Rockefeller Foundation. I think it's a better place. You get a bunch of very intelligent people sitting around trying to do good, I immediately get kind of suspicious and squirm in my seat.
If you're unhappy with what you've had over the last 50 years, you have an unfortunate misappraisal of life. It's as good as it gets, and it's very likely to get worse.
There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking.
A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
There's danger in just shoveling out money to people who say, 'My life is a little harder than it used to be.' At a certain place you've got to say to the people, 'Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.'
A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they've got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success
Move only when you have an advantage. It's very basic. You have to understand the odds and have the discipline to bet only when the odds are in your favor.
This is a good life lesson: getting the right people into your system is the most important thing you can do.
To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
I think we have lost our way when people like the [board of] governors and the CEO of the NYSE fail to realize they have a duty to the rest of us to act as exemplars... You do not want your first-grade school teacher to be fornicating on the floor or drinking booze in the classroom; similarly you do not want your stock exchange to be setting the wrong moral example.
It takes character to sit there with all that cash and do nothing. I didn't get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.
It's a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about your successes.
Most people are too fretful, they worry to much. Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it's time.
Here's one truth that perhaps your typical investment counselor would disagree with: if you're comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.
A lot of opportunities in life tend to last a short while, due to some temporary inefficiency... For each of us, really good investment opportunities aren't going to come along too often and won't last too long, so you've got to be ready to act and have a prepared mind.
Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification.
Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.
The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.
Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.
I got at a very early age, the idea that the safest way to try and get what you want, is to try and deserve what you want.
It’s such a simple idea, it’s the golden rule so to speak. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
The big money is not in the buying and selling ... but in the waiting.
Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime.
Whenever you think something or some person is ruining your life, it's you. A victimization mentality is so debilitating.
I don't spend much time regretting the past, once I've taken my lesson from it. I don't dwell on it.
Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.
Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.
I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.
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