Words matter. These are the best Charlie Munger Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies.
Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.
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.’
If you can get really good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 regard the bitcoin craze as totally asinine to create some manufactured currency.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
It’s a real pleasure to earn the trust of your customers slowly over time by doing what’s right.
