Charlie Munger Quotes
372 Charlie Munger Quotes
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[In October 2014.] It’s been my experience in life, if you just keep thinking and reading, you don’t have to work.
Charlie Munger
[In October 2014.] Part of the reason we have a decent record is that we pick things that are easy. Other people think they’re so smart, they can take on things that are really difficult, and that proves to be dangerous.
Charlie Munger
[In October 2014.] Three failing businesses together created Berkshire Hathaway. There are about the same number of shares outstanding now as they were then. I can’t think of anything like it at this scale. You’d think people would be paying more attention to it than they do.
Charlie Munger
[In October 2014.] I think
Elon Musk is a genius and I don’t use that word lightly. I think he’s also one of the boldest men that ever came down the pike.
Charlie Munger
[In October 2014.] I have never succeeded very much in anything in which I was not very interested. If you can’t somehow find yourself very interested in something, I don’t think you’ll succeed very much, even if you’re fairly smart.
Charlie Munger
[In October 2014.] I think if you expect totally rationality either in humans or human institutions, you’re expecting what’s not going to happen.
Charlie Munger
[In October 2014.] What is a little surprising is how stupid academia could be… There’s a lot of silliness in economics.
Charlie Munger
[In October 2014.] How many big companies stay totally on top forever? Maybe Wrigley’s Gum.
Charlie Munger
[In October 2014.] I would hate to be in a place where I had to pretend to believe all the things I don’t believe in order to handle my daily work and discussions. I just described the working lives of practically everybody. But not Warren [Buffett], not Charlie.
Charlie Munger
[In October 2014.] We haven’t found some miracle exemption from the laws of nature. We have ducked a lot of the problems other people have willingly taken on. Warren said, ‘We have not learned to jump over seven-foot fences. We found a way to step over little mud puddles and seize chunks of gold on the other side.’ You see, there aren’t enough mud puddles with gold on the other side, but there have been just enough for us. We work at it.
Charlie Munger
[In February 2015.] Buffett’s decision to limit his activities to a few kinds and to maximize his attention to them, and to keep doing so for 50 years, was a lollapalooza [something particularly impressive]. Buffett succeeded for the same reason Roger Federer became good at tennis. Buffett was, in effect, using the winning method of the famous basketball coach, John Wooden, who won most regularly after he had learned to assign virtually all playing time to his seven best players. That way, opponents always faced his best players, instead of his second best. And, with the extra playing time, the best players improved more than was normal. And Buffett much out-Woodened Wooden, because in his case the exercise of skill was concentrated in one person, not seven, and his skill improved and improved as he got older and older during 50 years, instead of deteriorating like the skill of a basketball player does.
Charlie Munger
[In February 2015.] Berkshire’s marvelous outcome in insurance was not a natural result. Ordinarily, a casualty insurance business is a producer of mediocre results, even when very well managed. And such results are of little use. Berkshire’s better outcome was so astoundingly large that I believe that Buffett would now fail to recreate it if he returned to a small base while retaining his smarts and regaining his youth.
Charlie Munger
[In February 2015.] Berkshire, by design, had methodological advantages to supplement its better opportunities. It never had the equivalent of a ‘department of acquisitions’ under pressure to buy. And it never relied on advice from ‘helpers’ sure to be prejudiced in favor of transactions. And Buffett held self-delusion at bay as he underclaimed expertise while he knew better than most corporate executives what worked and what didn’t in business, aided by his long experience as a passive investor. And, finally, even when Berkshire was getting much better opportunities than most others, Buffett often displayed almost inhuman patience and seldom bought. For instance, during his first ten years in control of Berkshire, Buffett saw one business (textiles) move close to death and two new businesses come in, for a net gain of one.
Charlie Munger
[In February 2015.] What were the big mistakes made by Berkshire under Buffett? Well, while mistakes of commission were common, almost all huge errors were in not making a purchase, including not purchasing Walmart stock when that was sure to work out enormously well. The errors of omission were of much importance. Berkshire’s net worth would now be at least $50 billion higher if it had seized several opportunities it was not quite smart enough to recognize as virtually sure things.
Ajit Jain and
Greg Abel are proven performers who would probably be under-described as ‘world-class.’ ‘World-leading’ would be the description I would choose. In some important ways, each is a better business executive than Buffett. And I believe neither Jain nor Abel would (1) leave Berkshire, no matter what someone else offered or (2) desire much change in the Berkshire system.
Charlie Munger
[In March 2015.] If interest rates go to zero and all the governments in the world print money like crazy and prices go down - of course I’m confused. Anybody who is intelligent who is not confused doesn’t understand the situation very well. If you find it puzzling, your brain is working correctly.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] My idea of shooting fish in a barrel, by the way, is to drain the barrel first.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] I didn’t know anything about relativity until Einstein taught me. I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out for myself.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] I don’t think it’s a great thing for a civilization where the people who are getting richest are a bunch of people who buy a block of shares and howl for change that helps the shareholders no matter what. I didn’t think the old system was perfect, either, but it can’t be a great way to run a civilization. Carl Icahn’s a very able man, but he should not be running the world.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] I have the kind of mind that when I want to read something I can tune everything else out. The people aren’t even present. In fact, I frequently sit in a room and converse with dead people while the living people around me are irritated…
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] I know no wise person who doesn’t read a lot.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] 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.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] It’s always wise to be prepared for it getting worse. Favorable surprises are easy to handle. It’s the unfavorable surprises that cause the trouble.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] Koreans came up from nothing in the auto business. They worked 84 hours a week with no overtime for more than a decade. At the same time every little Korean came home from grade school, and worked with a tutor for four full hours in the afternoon and the evening, driven by these Tiger Moms. Are you surprised when you lose to people like that? Only if you’re a total idiot.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] 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.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] Letting private agencies and private insurance do as they please? We’ve shown how well that works, our unregulated, wonderful people in finance. I’d rather trust some pathogens.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] We have a saying at Berkshire that when a man with a reputation for genius takes on a business with a reputation for tough operating conditions, it’s the reputation of the business that’s likely to prevail.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] I just thank God that they didn’t give me the assignment of managing $200 billion and beating the indexes… The people who still have value in investing are people who are willing to work very diligently and intelligently in less efficient markets. I think it is hard to be a great value investor with $200 billion under management. It takes a long time to buy in, a long time to sell out, other people copy your trades, it’s very difficult.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015 on 3G run by
Jorge Paulo Lemann their expertise in cost cutting.] Somebody who is tough enough, shrewd enough, who knows enough not to cut the wrong things and to do everything fair, has an opportunity to buy things and cut out expenses they don’t really need.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] Civilized man has always had soothsayers, shamans, faith healers, and God knows what all. The stock picking industry is four or five percent super rational, disciplined people, and the rest of them are like faith healers or shamans. And that’s just the way it is, I’m afraid. It’s nice that they keep an image of being constructive, sensible people when they’re really would-be faith healers. It keeps their self respect up.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] You make so much money running a casino, compared to any normal human business. There are no inventories, it’s like having license to print money, and people just can’t stand the temptation… I do not consider it desirable in the United States that we’ve created casinos and lotteries everywhere. That was not a desirable development in an advanced civilization, and the damn politicians that solve their short-term problems by bringing in this poison deserve to be in the lowest circle of h*ll.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] It’s just so useful dealing with people you can trust and getting all the others the hell out of your life… Wise people want to avoid other people who are just total rat poison, and there are a lot of them.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] The simplest way to get trust is to deserve it, and just keep deserving it.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] A lot of our major capitalistic institutions that parade as really respectable, they’re just casinos in drag. What do you think a derivative trading desk is? It’s a casino in drag. People feeling they’re contributing to the economy, and they’re managing risk. They make the witch doctors look good.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015 on advice for young entrepreneurs setting up new game changing internet based businesses.] I wish everybody well who’s good at it. I feel the same way about a guy that walks across the tight rope over Niagara Falls. It’s his way of making a living, but I’m not inclined to try it… I don’t have any advice for young people who want to get rich. Basically, I think the desire to get rich fast is pretty dangerous. My own system was to get rich slow.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] If you get rich fast all you can do is be robbed by your own employees and your yacht and so forth. Whereas if you get rich slow you amuse yourself over a lifetime.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] I don’t think it’s terribly constructive to spend your time worrying about things you can’t fix.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] Benjamin Franklin said a very wise thing. He said, ‘You keep your eyes wide open before a marriage and half shut thereafter.’
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] That’s what manhood is, taking life as it falls. Not whining all the time and trying to fix it by whining.
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] I’m really flabbergasted. How many in this room would have predicted negative interest rates in Europe?… How can I be an expert in something I never even thought about that seems so unlikely. It’s new territory…
Charlie Munger
[In April 2015.] The one thing that has surprised me all my life is how many people with high IQs do massively stupid things.
Charlie Munger
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