Charlie Munger Quotes

Those who will not face improvements because they are changes, will face changes that are not improvements.

How do you compete against a true fanatic? You can only try to build the best possible moat and continuously attempt to widen it.

It is 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.

It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy.

All intelligent investing is value investing - acquiring more that you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.

We're the tortoise that has outrun the hare because it chose the easy predictions.

Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group then to hell with them.

Determine value apart from price; progress apart from activity; wealth apart from size.

Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.

Berkshireis in the business of making easy predictions If a deal looks too hard, the partners simply shelve it.

We don't like trading agony for money

Understanding both the power of compound interest and the difficulty of getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things.

A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another.

It's a finite and very competitive world. All large aggregations of capital eventually find it hell on earth to grow and thus find a lower rate of return.

Mankind invented a system to cope with the fact that we are so intrinsically lousy at manipulating numbers. It's called the graph.

Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.

There is bound to be a regression toward the mean.

Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets - and can be lost in a heartbeat.

Warren is one of the best learning machines on this earth. The turtles who outrun the hares are learning machines. If you stop learning in this world, the world rushes right by you.

You must force yourself to consider opposing arguments. Especially when they challenge your best loved ideas.

Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.

You're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That's value investing.

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.

We have a high moral responsibility to be rational

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.

The tax code gives you an enormous advantage if you can find some things you can just sit with.

Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.

We tend to buy things - a lot of things - where we don't know exactly what will happen, but the outcome will be decent.

Over the very long term, history shows that the chances of any business surviving in a manner agreeable to a company's owners are slim at best.

A lot of our respected financial institutions are just casinos in drag.

Bull markets go to people's heads. If you're a duck on a pond, and it's rising due to a downpour, you start going up in the world. But you think it's you, not the pond.

A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: "You don't seem smart enough to be so good at what you're doing. Do you have an explanation?"

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.

An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it's more available to you.

There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: Its the strong swimmers who drown.

We only want what success we can get despite encouraging others to share our general view about reality.

Just avoid things like racing trains to the crossing, doing cocaine, etc. Develop good mental habits.

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome

Part of [having uncommon sense] is being able to tune out folly, as opposed to recognizing wisdom. If you bat away many things, you don't clutter yourself.

Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don't need these kinds of innovation in finance. It's OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets.

No CEO examining books today understands what the hell is going on.

If the value of a company doesn't just scream out at you, it's too close.

Just as a man working with his tools should know its limitations, a man working with his cognitive apparatus must know its limitations.

The game is to keep learning, and I don't think people are going to keep learning who don't like the learning process.

You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.

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.

Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.

In my life there are not that many questions I can't properly deal with using my $40 adding machine and dog-eared compound interest table.

In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don't give a damn about safety. They let it balloon and balloon and balloon. It's aided by false accounting.

How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?