Charlie Munger Quotes

If people tell you what you really don't want to hear what's unpleasant-there's an almost automatic reaction of antipathy. You have to train yourself out of it.

There are a lot of things in life way more important than money. All that said, some people do get confused. I play golf with a man who says, " What good is health? You can't buy money with it."

[With] closet indexing....you're paying a manager a fortune and he has 85% of his assets invested parallel to the indexes. If you have such a system, you're being played for a sucker.

The best armor of old age is a well-spent life preceding it.

Even in pure mathematics they can't remove all paradox, and the rest of us should also recognize we are going to have to endure a lot of paradox, like it or not.

We’re partial to putting out large amounts of money where we won’t have to make another decision.

I don't invest in what I don't understand. And I don't want to understand Facebook.

I think there's something to be said for developing the disposition to own stocks without fretting.

We bought a doomed textile mill [Berkshire Hathaway] and a California S&L [Savings & Loan; Wesco] just before a calamity. Both were bought at a discount to liquidation value.

Litigation is notoriously time-consuming, inefficient, costly and unpredictable.

I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues - they may know a lot of French however.

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.

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.

Kellogg's and Campbell's moats have also shrunk due to the increased buying power of supermarkets and companies like Wal-Mart. The muscle power of Wal-Mart and Costco has increased dramatically.

You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader.

When it gets into these spikes, with shortages and uproar and so forth, people go bananas, but that's capitalism.

So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.

Being short and seeing a promoter take the stock up is very irritating. It's not worth it to have that much irritation in your life.

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.

I know just enough about thermodynamics to understand that if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that's a very stupid way to solve an energy problem.

I won’t bet $100 against house odds between now and the grave.

Invert, always invert.

...being an effective teacher is a high calling.

I don't want to understand Facebook.

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.

The idea of excessive diversification is madness. Wide diversification, which necessarily includes investment in mediocre businesses, only guarantees ordinary results.

If you can buy the best companies, over time the pricing takes care of itself.

Our biggest mistakes, were things we didn't do, companies we didn't buy.

Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay were caricatures - they were easy to spot. They were almost psychopaths. But it's much harder to spot problems at companies like Royal Dutch [Shell].

Once you get into debt, it’s hell to get out. Don’t let credit card debt carry over. You can’t get ahead paying eighteen percent.

We want very good leaders who have a lot of power.

Trying to prioritize among things we're unlikely to do is pretty fruitless.

We have a history when things are really horrible of wading in when no one else will.

The old culture had come out of poverty, out of English customs.

If we mix only a moderate minority share of turds with the raisins each year, probably no one will recognize what will ultimately become a very large collection of turds.

Beta and modern portfolio theory and the like - none of it makes any sense to me.

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.

It would be nice if this [finding really cheap stocks] happened all the time. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

If you rise in life, you have to behave in a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you're a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you're the Bishop of Boston, you shouldn't go.

Choose clients as you would friends.

It took us months of buying all the Coke stock we could to accumulate $1 billion worth - equal to 7% of the company. It's very hard to accumulate major positions.

Let me know what your problem is, and I will try to make it more difficult for you.

Wrigley is a great business, but that doesn't solve the problem. Buying great businesses at advantageous prices is very tough.

The liabilities are always 100 percent good. It's the assets you have to worry about.

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.

I think gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.

If you have the opportunities of Berkshire, an investment in gold is dumb.

The investment game is getting more and more competitive.

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.'

The laws of thermodynamic s are such that if the water is getting warmer - and I believe it is - the energy of the weather is going to go up.