Top 100 Charlie Munger Sayings
#1. We both (Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett) insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.
Charlie Munger
#2. Buffett found it 'extraordinary' that academics studied such things. They studied what was measurable, rather than what was meaningful. 'As a friend [Charlie Munger] said, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Roger Lowenstein
#3. In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have worked together, we have never forgone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions.
Warren Buffett
#4. I've adopted the guideline of Warren Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, who says I wanna know where I'll be when I die - so I never go there.
Tom Brokaw
#5. Over the years, Charlie [Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman] and I have observed many accounting -based frauds of staggering size. Few of the perpetrators have been punished; many have not even been censured. It has been far safer to steal large sums with pen than small sums with a gun.
Warren Buffett
#6. 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
#7. Charlie [Munger] and I are not big fans of resumes. Instead, we focus on brains, passion and integrity.
Warren Buffett
#8. A board member should be perfectly willing to leave at any time and willing to make the tough calls.
Charlie Munger
#9. 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
#10. There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking.
Charlie Munger
#11. To say accounting for derivatives is Americais a sewer is an insult to sewage.
Charlie Munger
#12. You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality. If you don't have the cast of mind, you're destined for failure even if you have a high I.Q.
Charlie Munger
#13. Cicero's words also increased my personal satisfaction by supporting my long-standing rejection of a conventional point of view.
Charlie Munger
#14. A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.
Charlie Munger
#15. Good businesses can survive a little bad management.
Charlie Munger
#16. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?
Charlie Munger
#17. Avoid working directly under somebody you don't admire and don't want to be like.
Charlie Munger
#18. 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
#20. I won't bet $100 against house odds between now and the grave.
Charlie Munger
#21. One could imagine a period like Japan13 years ago, however, in which indexing over time wouldn't work.
Charlie Munger
#22. The idea of caring is that someone is making money faster [than you are] is one of the deadly sins. Envy is a really stupid sin because it's the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There's a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley?
Charlie Munger
#23. What good is envy? It's the one sin you can't have any fun at.
Charlie Munger
#24. Common stock investors can make money by predicting the outcomes of practice evolution. You can't derive this by fundamental analysis - you must think biologically.
Charlie Munger
#25. The normal expectancy of the average investor - for example, the pension funds of AT&T or IBM - is 6% for a long time.
Charlie Munger
#26. Let me know what your problem is, and I will try to make it more difficult for you.
Charlie Munger
#27. The investment game is getting more and more competitive.
Charlie Munger
#28. My idea of a good place to shop is Costco - it has these heavily marbled fillet steaks. The idea of eating some wheat thing and washing it down with carrot juice has never appealed to me.
Charlie Munger
#29. 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
#30. We have a high moral responsibility to be rational
Charlie Munger
#31. One of the smartest things a person can do is dampen investment expectations, especially with Berkshire. That would be mature and responsible. I like our model and we should do nicely
Charlie Munger
#32. 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.
Charlie Munger
#33. I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it; indeed, especially when one doesn't like it.
Charlie Munger
#34. How you behave in one place, will help in surprising ways later.
Charlie Munger
#35. You're not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You're going to advance in life by what you're going to learn after you leave here.
Charlie Munger
#36. You have a real asset-price bubble in places like parts of California and the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Charlie Munger
#37. If you don't allow for self-serving bias in the conduct of others, you are, again, a fool.
Charlie Munger
#38. You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth.
Charlie Munger
#39. 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.
Charlie Munger
#40. Over many decades, our usual practice is that if something we like goes down, we buy more and more. Sometimes something happens, you realize you're wrong, and you get out. But if you develop correct confidence in your judgment, buy more and take advantage of stock prices.
Charlie Munger
#41. Wrigley is a great business, but that doesn't solve the problem. Buying great businesses at advantageous prices is very tough.
Charlie Munger
#42. 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
#43. We're partial to putting out large amounts of money where we won't have to make another decision.
Charlie Munger
#44. Most people are too fretful, they worry to much. Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it's time.
Charlie Munger
#45. Acknowledging what you don't know is the dawning of wisdom.
Charlie Munger
#46. The stupid and dishonest accountants allowed the genie of totally inappropriate accounting to descend on derivatives books. And once this has happened - people get status, etc. - it's impossible to get it back into the bottle.
Charlie Munger
#47. I've been associated with Warren ( Buffett) so long, I thought I'd be just a footnote.
Charlie Munger
#49. If you have the opportunities of Berkshire, an investment in gold is dumb.
Charlie Munger
#50. So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.
Charlie Munger
#51. You'll better understand the evil when top audit firms started selling fraudulent tax shelters when I tell you that one told me that they're better [than the others] because they only sold [the schemes] to their top-20 clients, so no-one would notice.
Charlie Munger
#52. Just as a man working with his tools should know its limitations, a man working with his cognitive apparatus must know its limitations.
Charlie Munger
#53. If we've been a little more successful than other people, is because we always realised that the school of life was always open, and if you were not learning more you are falling behind.
Charlie Munger
#54. The best armor of old age is a well-spent life preceding it.
Charlie Munger
#55. I've heard that one-half of the students at elite schools want to go into private equity or hedge funds. They want to keep up with their age cohorts at Goldman. This can't possibly end well in terms of meeting these expectations.
Charlie Munger
#56. Missing out on some opportunity never bothers us. What's wrong with someone getting a little richer than you? It's crazy to worry about this ...
Charlie Munger
#57. Well in the history of the See's Candy Company they always say, "I never did it before, and I'm never going to do it again." And we cashier them. It would be evil not to, because terrible behavior spreads.
Charlie Munger
#58. I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don't have any real knowledge.
Charlie Munger
#59. In Gillette's case, they keep surfing along new technology which is fairly simple by the standards of microchips. But it's hard for competitors to do. So they've been able to stay constantly near the edge of improvements in shaving.
Charlie Munger
#60. For many of our shareholders, our stock is all they own, and we're acutely aware of that. Our culture [of conservatism] runs pretty deep.
Charlie Munger
#61. 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
#62. Fancy computers are engaging in legalized front-running. The profits are clearly coming from the rest of us - our college endowments and our pensions. Why is this legal? What the hell is the government thinking? It's like letting rats into a restaurant.
Charlie Munger
#63. We want very good leaders who have a lot of power.
Charlie Munger
#64. Berkshire's past record has been almost ridiculous. If Berkshirehad used even half the leverage of, say, Rupert Murdoch, it would be five times its current size.
Charlie Munger
#65. There has never been a master plan. Anyone who wanted to do it, we fired because it takes on a life of its own and doesn't cover new reality. We want people taking into account new information.
Charlie Munger
#66. I see almost no change in the price of the composite product that flows through Costco I don't feel sorry for the people who pay $27 million for an 8,000-square-foot condo in Manhattan. So inflation comes in places.
Charlie Munger
#67. I'm right, and you're smart, and sooner or later you'll see I'm right.
Charlie Munger
#68. It would be one of the most irritating experiences in the world to do a lot of work to uncover a fraud and then at have it go from X to 3X and at h the crooks happily partying with your money while you're meeting margin calls. Why would you want to go within hailing distance of that?
Charlie Munger
#69. Of course the self-serving bias is something you want to get out of yourself. Thinking that what's good for you is good for the wider civilization and rationalizing all these ridiculous conclusions based on this subconscious tendency to serve one's self is a terribly inaccurate way to think.
Charlie Munger
#70. 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.'
Charlie Munger
#71. If you can buy the best companies, over time the pricing takes care of itself.
Charlie Munger
#72. 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
#73. I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest
sometimes not even the most diligent. But they are learning machines; they go to bed every night a little wiser than when they got up. And, boy, does that habit help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
Charlie Munger
#74. To atone, I teach and try to set an example ... I love spreading this stuff around. Just because it's trite doesn't mean it isn't right. In fact, I like to say, 'If it's trite, it's right.'
Charlie Munger
#75. You must force yourself to consider opposing arguments. Especially when they challenge your best loved ideas.
Charlie Munger
#76. If it happens every year like clockwork, what's so extraordinary about it?
Charlie Munger
#77. A business model that relies on trickery is doomed to fail.
Charlie Munger
#78. Proper accounting is like engineering. You need a margin of safety. Thank God we don't design bridges and airplanes the way we do accounting.
Charlie Munger
#79. Derivative trading with mark-to-market accounting degenerates into mark-to-model. Two firms make a big derivative trade and the accountants on both sides show a large profit from the same trade.
Charlie Munger
#80. I think the main figure that matters to all of us, including people in the media, is: How does GDP per capita grow? And those figures have been very good. There is a huge flux both up and down, so it isn't like we're all static in status. What's important is that pie grows.
Charlie Munger
#81. 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.
Charlie Munger
#82. Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.
Charlie Munger
#83. I think we have some special talents. That being said, I think it's dangerous to rely on special talents - it's better to own lots of monopolistic businesses with unregulated prices. But that's not the world today. We have made money exercising our talents and will continue to do so.
Charlie Munger
#84. What's the best way to get a good spouse? The best single way is to deserve a good spouse because a good spouse is by definition not nuts.
Charlie Munger
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. The harder you work, the more confidence you get. But you may be working hard on something that is false.
Charlie Munger
#88. Whenever you think something or some person is ruining your life, it's you. A victimization mentality is so debilitating.
Charlie Munger
#89. It takes almost no capital to open a new See's candy store. We're drowning in capital of our own that has almost no cost. It would be crazy to franchise stores like some capital-starved pancake house. We like owning our own stores as a matter of quality control.
Charlie Munger
#90. [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
#91. The perfect example of Darwinism is what technology has done to businesses.
Charlie Munger
#92. Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa.
Charlie Munger
#93. We don't have any miraculous way of avoiding taxes at Wesco and Berkshire.
Charlie Munger
#94. We don't have an isolated group [of senior managers] surrounded by servants. Berkshire's headquarters is a tiny little suite. We just came back from Berkshire's board meeting; it had moved up to the board room of the Kiewit company and [it was so large and luxurious that] I felt uncomfortable.
Charlie Munger
#96. To me, it's obvious that the winner has to bet very selectively. It's been obvious to me since very early in life. I don't know why it's not obvious to very many other people.
Charlie Munger
#98. Some important factor doesn't lose its "share of force" just because some "expert" can better measure other types of force.
Charlie Munger
#99. When you borrow a man's car, always return it with a tank of gas.
Charlie Munger
#100. The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
Charlie Munger
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