Top 100 Charlie Munger Quotes
#1. They [Mc Donalds] take people and give them a first job, which enables them to get a second job. They do a very good job of educating troubled young people to be good citizens and they're probably more successful than charter schools.
Charlie Munger
#2. There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking.
Charlie Munger
#3. A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.
Charlie Munger
#4. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?
Charlie Munger
#5. Avoid working directly under somebody you don't admire and don't want to be like.
Charlie Munger
#6. 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.
Charlie Munger
#8. What good is envy? It's the one sin you can't have any fun at.
Charlie Munger
#9. If all you succeed in doing in life is getting rich by buying little pieces of paper, it's a failed life. Life is more than being shrewd in wealth accumulation.
Charlie Munger
#10. You have a real asset-price bubble in places like parts of California and the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Charlie Munger
#11. Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke. You've made an enormous commitment to something.You've poured effort and money in. And the more you put in, the more that the whole consistency principle makes you think.
Charlie Munger
#12. Most people are too fretful, they worry to much. Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it's time.
Charlie Munger
#13. I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don't have any real knowledge.
Charlie Munger
#14. The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward for.
If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor.
Charlie Munger
#15. I'm right, and you're smart, and sooner or later you'll see I'm right.
Charlie Munger
#16. If you can buy the best companies, over time the pricing takes care of itself.
Charlie Munger
#17. The whole concept of dividing it up into 'value' and 'growth' strikes me as twaddle. It's convenient for a bunch of pension fund consultants to get fees prattling about and a way for one advisor to distinguish himself from another. But, to me, all intelligent investing is value investing.
Charlie Munger
#18. If it happens every year like clockwork, what's so extraordinary about it?
Charlie Munger
#19. We've had the most massive creation of wealth for people a lot younger than those who formerly got wealth in the history of the world. The world is full of young people who really want to get rich, and when I left school nobody thought it was a reasonable possibility.
Charlie Munger
#20. It's hard to predict what will happen with two brands in a market. Sometimes they will behave in a gentlemanly way, and sometimes they'll pound each other. I know of no way to predict whether they'll compete moderately or to the death. If you could figure it out, you could make a lot of money.
Charlie Munger
#21. [GEICO] got to thinking that, because they were making a lot of money, they knew everything. And they suffered huge losses. All they had to do was to cut out all the folly and go back to the perfectly wonderful business that was lying there.
Charlie Munger
#22. The perfect example of Darwinism is what technology has done to businesses.
Charlie Munger
#23. Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa.
Charlie Munger
#25. When you borrow a man's car, always return it with a tank of gas.
Charlie Munger
#26. The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
Charlie Munger
#27. It's natural that you'd have more brains going into money management. There are so many huge incomes in money management and investment banking - it's like ants to sugar. There are huge incentives for a man to take up money management as opposed to, say, physics, and it's a lot easier.
Charlie Munger
#28. We tend to buy things - a lot of things - where we don't know exactly what will happen, but the outcome will be decent.
Charlie Munger
#29. Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.
Charlie Munger
#30. It's a rare business that doesn't have a way worse future than it has a past.
Charlie Munger
#32. Those who will not face improvements because they are changes, will face changes that are not improvements.
Charlie Munger
#33. We have to have a special insight, or we'll put it in the 'too tough' basket. All of you have to look for a special area of competency and focus on that.
Charlie Munger
#34. The only intelligence investing is value investing ... to acquire more than one is paying for.
Charlie Munger
#35. Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.
Charlie Munger
#36. 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.
Charlie Munger
#37. We're emphasizing the knowable by predicting how certain people and companies will swim against the current. We're not predicting the fluctuation in the current.
Charlie Munger
#38. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: Its the strong swimmers who drown.
Charlie Munger
#39. When I run into a paradox I think either I'm a total horse's ass to have gotten to this point, or I'm fruitfully near the edge of my discipline. It adds excitement to life to wonder which it is.
Charlie Munger
#40. If mutual fund directors are independent, then I'm the lead character in the Bolshoi Ballet.
Charlie Munger
#41. One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year.
Charlie Munger
#42. It's human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it's terrible that managements go along with this.
Charlie Munger
#43. You don't have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long, time.
Charlie Munger
#44. The reason we avoid the word 'synergy' is because people generally claim more synergistic benefits than will come. Yes, it exists, but there are so many false promises.Berkshire is full of synergies - we don't avoid synergies, just claims of synergies.
Charlie Munger
#45. I feel that by getting rich in the way I did, I think my own example has hurt my own country.
Charlie Munger
#46. If it is wisdom you're after, you're going to spend a lot of time on your ass reading.
Charlie Munger
#47. You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models.
Charlie Munger
#48. We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.
Charlie Munger
#49. There is the sheer amount of Franklin's wisdom. And the talent. Franklin played four instruments. He was the nation's leading scientist and inventor, plus a leading author, statesman, and philanthropist. There has never been anyone like him.
Charlie Munger
#50. Most people will see declining returns [due to inflation]. One of the great defenses if you're worried about inflation is not to have a lot of silly needs in your life - you don't need a lot of material goods.
Charlie Munger
#51. I don't invest in what I don't understand. And I don't want to understand Facebook.
Charlie Munger
#52. The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much.
Charlie Munger
#53. 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.
Charlie Munger
#54. If you, like me, lived through 1973-74 or even the early 1990s ... There was a waiting list to get OUT of the country club - that's when you know things are tough. If you live long enough, you'll see it.
Charlie Munger
#55. You don't have to have perfect wisdom to get very rich - just a bit better than average over a long period of time.
Charlie Munger
#56. I think the idea that the hedge fund manager gets lower taxes than the taxi driver or the physics professor is insane. The legislators who leave that policy in place are derelict in their duties to be rational and fair. There are plenty of them in both political parties. It's totally outrageous.
Charlie Munger
#57. It's a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about your successes.
Charlie Munger
#58. I would argue that a majority of the horrors we face would not have happened if the accounting profession developed and enforced better accounting.
Charlie Munger
#59. It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.
Charlie Munger
#60. In the LBO field there is a buried "covariance" with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.
Charlie Munger
#61. Black-Scholes works for short-term options, but if it's a long-term option and you think you know something [about the underlying asset], it's insane to use Black-Scholes.
Charlie Munger
#62. We have a history when things are really horrible of wading in when no one else will.
Charlie Munger
#63. If you want good behavior, don't pay on a commission basis. Our judges aren't paid so much a case. We keep them pretty well isolated with a fixed salary. Judges in this whole thing have come out pretty well - there have been relatively few scandals.
Charlie Munger
#64. If you buy something because it's undervalued, then you have to think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of its intrinsic value. That's hard. But if you buy a few great companies, then you can sit on your ass. That's a good thing.
Charlie Munger
#65. Our success has come from the lack of oversight we've provided, and our success will continue to be from a lack of oversight. But if you're going to provide minimal oversight, you have to buy carefully. It's a different model from GE's. GE's works - it's just very different from ours.
Charlie Munger
#66. For some odd reason, I had an early and extreme multidisciplinary cast of mind. I couldn't stand reaching for a small idea in my own discipline when there was a big idea right over the fence in somebody else's discipline. So I just grabbed in all directions for the big ideas that would really work.
Charlie Munger
#67. Spend less than you make; always be saving something. Put it into a tax-deferred account. Over time, it will begin to amount to something. This is such a no-brainer.
Charlie Munger
#68. The liabilities are always 100 percent good. It's the assets you have to worry about.
Charlie Munger
#69. Determine value apart from price; progress apart from activity; wealth apart from size.
Charlie Munger
#70. I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.
Charlie Munger
#71. Those of us who have been very fortunate have a duty to give back. Whether one gives a lot as one goes along as I do or a little and then a lot [when one dies] as Warrendoes is a matter of personal preference. I would hate to have people ask me for money all day long.
Charlie Munger
#72. The cost of being a publicly traded stock has gone way, way up. It doesn't make sense for a little company to be public anymore. A lot of little companies are going private to be rid of these burdensome requirements ...
Charlie Munger
#73. A lot of our respected financial institutions are just casinos in drag.
Charlie Munger
#74. Just avoid things like racing trains to the crossing, doing cocaine, etc. Develop good mental habits.
Charlie Munger
#75. Early Charlie Munger is a horrible career model for the young because not enough was delivered to civilization in return for what was wrested from capitalism. And other similar career models are even worse.
Charlie Munger
#76. With so much money riding on reported numbers, human nature is to manipulate them. And with so many doing it, you get Serpico effects, where everyone rationalizes that it's okay because everyone else is doing it. It is always thus.
Charlie Munger
#77. Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy ...
Charlie Munger
#78. If the value of a company doesn't just scream out at you, it's too close.
Charlie Munger
#79. While no real money came down, my family gave me a good education and a marvelous example of how people should behave, and in the end that was more valuable than money. Being surrounded by the right values from the beginning is an immense treasure. Warrenhad that. It even has a financial advantage.
Charlie Munger
#80. No CEO examining books today understands what the hell is going on.
Charlie Munger
#81. If you want to understand science, you have to understand math. In business, if you're enumerate, you're going to be a klutz. The good thing about business is that you don't have to know any higher math ...
Charlie Munger
#82. Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.
Charlie Munger
#83. The interesting thing is the field is so big - it's enormous. One thing a modern civilization needs is energy.
Charlie Munger
#84. If you skillfully follow the multidisciplinary path, you will never wish to come back. It would be like cutting off your hands.
Charlie Munger
#85. Accounting is a big subject and there are huge forces in play. The entire momentum of existing thinking and existing custom is in a direction that allows terrible follies to happen, and the terrible follies have terrible consequences.
Charlie Munger
#86. We have the same problem as everyone else: It's very hard to predict the future ...
Charlie Munger
#87. It would be easier to screw up American Express than Coke or Gillette, but it's an immensely strong business.
Charlie Munger
#88. The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It's like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.
Charlie Munger
#89. An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it's more available to you.
Charlie Munger
#91. I remember the $0.05 hamburger and a $0.40-per-hour minimum wage, so I've seen a tremendous amount of inflation in my lifetime. Did it ruin the investment climate? I think not.
Charlie Munger
#92. 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.
Charlie Munger
#94. If you have competence, you know the edge. It wouldnt be a competence if you didnt know where the boundaries lie. Asking whether youve passed the boundary is a question that almost answers itself.
Charlie Munger
#95. I think track records are very important. If you start early trying to have a perfect one in some simple thing like honesty, you're well on your way to success in this world.
Charlie Munger
#96. Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification.
Charlie Munger
#97. Any time anybody offers you anything with a big commission and a 200-page prospectus, don't buy it. Occasionally, you'll be wrong if you adopt "Munger's Rule". However, over a lifetime, you'll be a long way ahead-and you will miss a lot of unhappy experiences.
Charlie Munger
#98. Almost all good businesses engage in 'pain today, gain tomorrow' activities.
Charlie Munger
#99. In fact I've probably never seen such a wide moat.
Charlie Munger
#100. Is anyone really surprised that Warren, who is the ultimate embodiment of concentrated decision-making power, picked somebody [Bill and Melinda Gates] who he thinks is like him in many important ways? It was a noble and sensible decision.
Charlie Munger
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