Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway’s vice chairman since 1978, has helped shape it into a $700 billion conglomerate.
Besides traditional value investing, Munger has pushed for acquiring high-quality businesses at fair prices.
A WWII veteran, Munger attended Harvard Law School, then shifted from law to finance in the 1960s.
Before partnering with Warren Buffett, he ran his own investment firm.
He also chairs the Daily Journal Corporation board and serves as Independent Director of Costco.
Born in 1924, his net worth was estimated to be $2.5 billion by Forbes in 2022.
See also: Warren Buffett Quotes and Robert Kiyosaki Quotes.
I have made a list of the best quotes by Charlie Munger for you to enhance your investing acumen and knowledge.
Best Charlie Munger Quotes
1. “Recognize reality even when you don’t like it – especially when you don’t like it.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
2. “Acknowledging what you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
3. “No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
4. “Three rules for a career: Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself. Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire. Work only with people you enjoy.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
5. “Take a simple idea and take it seriously.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
6. “There are always people who will be better at something than you are. You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
7. “People calculate too much and think too little.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
8. “You don’t have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long time.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
9. “The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
10. “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time — none, zero.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
11. “Spend each day getting a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for a fast spurt. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
12. “Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets – and can be lost in a heartbeat.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
13. “The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
14. “All intelligent investing is value investing – acquiring more than you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
15. “The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
16. “Assume life will be really tough, and then ask if you can handle it. If the answer is yes, you’ve won.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
17. “A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
18. “I’m right, and you’re smart, and sooner or later you’ll see I’m right.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
Wise Charlie Munger Quotes
19. “Almost all good businesses engage in ‘pain today, gain tomorrow’ activities.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
20. “When you borrow a man’s car, always return it with a tank of gas.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
21. “The wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don’t. It’s just that simple.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
22. “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
23. “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).
24. “We have three baskets for investing: yes, no and too tough to understand.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
25. “I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
26. “Determine value apart from price; progress apart from activity; wealth apart from size.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
27. “Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
28. “Intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you’re really going to excel in it.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
29. “The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
30. “What you have to learn is to fold early when the odds are against you, or if you have a big edge, back it heavily because you don’t get a big edge often. Opportunity comes, but it doesn’t come often, so seize it when it does come.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
31. “The difference between a good business and a bad business is that good businesses throw up one easy decision after another. The bad businesses throw up painful decisions time after time.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
32. “I think track records are very important. If you start early trying to have a perfect one in some simple thing like honesty, you’re well on your way to success in this world.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
33. “Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
34. “It never ceases to amaze me to see how much territory can be grasped if one merely masters and consistently uses all the obvious and easily learned principles.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
35. “Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
36. “It’s not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time. But it is given to human beings who work hard at it – who look and sift the world for a mispriced bet – that they can occasionally find one.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
37. “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).
38. “Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
39. “We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
40. “Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhibit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
41. “Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
Profound Charlie Munger Quotes
42. “Invert, always invert.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
43. “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
44. “I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
45. “If you don’t keep learning, other people will pass you by. Temperament alone won’t do it – you need a lot of curiosity for a long, long time.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
46. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
47. “Whenever you think something or some person is ruining your life, it’s you. A victimization mentality is so debilitating.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
48. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
49. “If only I had the influence with my wife and children that I have in some other quarters!” ~ (Charlie Munger).
50. “Most people are too fretful, they worry too much. Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it’s time.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
51. “Any year that you don’t destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
52. “I won’t bet $100 against house odds between now and the grave.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
53. “One could imagine a period like Japan 13 years ago, however, in which indexing over time wouldn’t work.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
54. “Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
55. “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).
56. “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).
57. “The quality of the medical care delivered, including the pharmaceutical industry, has improved a lot. I don’t think it’s crazy for a rich country like the USto spend 15% of GDP on healthcare, and if it rose to 16-17%, it’s not a big worry.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
58. “Hard work, honesty, if you keep at it, will get you almost anything.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
59. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
60. “Just keep your head down and do your best.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
Top Charlie Munger Quotes
61. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
62. “Step by step you get ahead, but rarely in fast spurts.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
63. “Understanding both the power of compound interest and the difficulty of getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
64. “Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
65. “It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
66. “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).
67. “Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
68. “It’s been my experience in life, if you just keep thinking and reading, you don’t have to work.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
69. “We have a passion for keeping things simple.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
70. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
71. “The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
72. “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
73. “Some people seem to think there’s no trouble just because it hasn’t happened yet. If you jump out the window at the 42nd floor and you’re still doing fine as you pass the 27th floor, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a serious problem. I would want to address the problem right now.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
74. “Your life must focus on the maximization of objectivity.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
75. “I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
76. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
77. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
78. “The laws of thermodynamics are such that if the water is getting warmer – and I believe it is – the energy of the weather is going to go up.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
79. “It’s not a competency if you don’t know the edge of it.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
80. “If we’ve been a little more successful than other people it 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).
81. “When you mix raisins and turds, you’ve still got turds.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
82. “All sensible investing is value investing.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
83. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
84. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
85. “You’ve got to have models in your head and you’ve got to array your experience – both vicarious and direct – onto this latticework of mental models.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
86. “The only way to win is to work, work, work, work, and hope to have a few insights.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
87. “Choose clients as you would friends.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
88. “The game is to keep learning, and I don’t think people are going to keep learning who don’t like the learning process.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
89. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
90. “There’s no way that you can live an adequate life without making many mistakes.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
91. “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).
92. “How do you compete against a true fanatic? You can only try to build the best possible moat and continuously attempt to widen it.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
93. “You don’t have to have perfect wisdom to get very rich – just a bit better than average over a long period of time.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
Famous Charlie Munger Quotes
94. “We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
95. “Darwin paid particular attention to disconfirming evidence. Objectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you’re going to be a great thinker.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
96. “When you locate a bargain, you must ask, ‘Why me, God? Why am I the only one who could find this bargain?’” ~ (Charlie Munger).
97. “Warren spends 70 hours a week thinking about investing.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
98. “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).
99. “It’s a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about your successes.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
100. “It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
101. “You must force yourself to consider opposing arguments. Especially when they challenge your best loved ideas.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
102. “Capitalism is a pretty brutal place.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
103. “If you buy something because it’s undervalued, then you have to think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of its intrinsic value. That’s hard. But if you buy a few great companies, then you can sit on your ass. That’s a good thing.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
104. “Those who keep learning, will keep rising in life.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
105. “Those who will not face improvements because they are changes, will face changes that are not improvements.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
106. “I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person’s brain because it understands the most fundamental models- ones that will do most work per unit.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
107. “Spend less than you make; always be saving something. Put it into a tax-deferred account. Over time, it will begin to amount to something. This is such a no-brainer.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
108. “Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
109. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
110. “Rationality is not just something you do so that you can make more money, it is a binding principle. Rationality is a really good idea. You must avoid the nonsense that is conventional in one’s own time. It requires developing systems of thought that improve your batting average over time.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
111. “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
112. “There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: Its the strong swimmers who drown.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
113. “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
114. “Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
115. “Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
116. “If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
117. “We don’t like trading agony for money.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
118. “Opportunity cost is a huge filter in life. If you’ve got two suitors who are really eager to have you and one is way the hell better than the other, you do not have to spend much time with the other. And that’s the way we filter out buying opportunities.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
119. “How you behave in one place, will help in surprising ways later.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
120. “Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
121. “I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
122. “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).
123. “We have a high moral responsibility to be rational.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
124. “We’ve got great flexibility and a certain discipline in terms of not doing some foolish thing just to be active – discipline in avoiding just doing any damn thing just because you can’t stand inactivity.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
125. “If you don’t allow for self-serving bias in the conduct of others, you are, again, a fool.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
Short Charlie Munger Quotes
126. “Whoever makes you smarter a little earlier in life makes you better.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
127. “What good is envy? It’s the one sin you can’t have any fun at.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
128. “A business model that relies on trickery is doomed to fail.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
129. “The tradition of always looking for the answer in the most fundamental way available – that is a great tradition, and it saves a lot of time in this world.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
130. “It’s dishonourable to stay stupider than you need to be.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
131. “It’s very useful to have a good grasp of all the big ideas in hard and soft science. A, it gives perspective. B, it gives a way for you to organize and file away experience in your head, so to speak.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
132. “If you want to understand science, you have to understand math. In business, if you’re enumerate, you’re going to be a klutz. The good thing about business is that you don’t have to know any higher math…” ~ (Charlie Munger).
133. “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).
134. “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).
135. “When I run into a paradox I think either I’m a total horse’s ass to have gotten to this point, or I’m fruitfully near the edge of my discipline. It adds excitement to life to wonder which it is.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
136. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
137. “We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It’s a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who’s rich and you ask, ‘How can I become like you, except faster?’” ~ (Charlie Munger).
138. “Accounting is a big subject and there are huge forces in play. The entire momentum of existing thinking and existing custom is in a direction that allows terrible follies to happen, and the terrible follies have terrible consequences.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
139. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
140. “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).
141. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
142. “Cicero’s words also increased my personal satisfaction by supporting my long-standing rejection of a conventional point of view.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
143. “It would be easier to screw up American Express than Coke or Gillette, but it’s an immensely strong business.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
144. “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).
145. “I don’t want to sell credit to people who are going to hurt themselves with it. You should only sell products that are good for the people who use them. Some disagree with this, but I know I’m right. That is to say, you’re talking to a Republican who admires Elizabeth Warren.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
146. “It’s simplicity itself that its future will be way worse than its past.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
147. “Litigation is notoriously time-consuming, inefficient, costly and unpredictable.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
148. “It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
149. “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
150. “Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
151. “The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights and you’re probably not going to be smart enough to find thousands in a lifetime. And when you get a few, you really load up. It’s just that simple.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
152. “Since mistakes of omission don’t appear in the financial statements, most people don’t pay attention to them. We rub our noses in mistakes of omission – as we just did.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
153. “Don’t do cocaine. Don’t race trains. And avoid AIDS situations.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
154. “I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it. Some people, like some of the women I know, have a black belt in spending. They were born with that. But what they gave me was a black belt in chutzpah.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
155. “Beta and modern portfolio theory and the like – none of it makes any sense to me.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
Inspiring Charlie Munger Quotes
156. “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).
157. “The Internet bubble circa 2000 is the most extreme in modern capitalism. In the 1930s, we had the worst depression in 600 years. Today is almost as extreme in the opposite way.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
158. “It’s stupid the way people extrapolate the past – and not slightly stupid, but massively stupid.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
159. “If it is wisdom you’re after, you’re going to spend a lot of time on your ass reading.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
160. “If you can buy the best companies, over time the pricing takes care of itself.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
161. “What matters most: passion or competence that was born in? Berkshire is full of people who have a peculiar passion for their own business. I would argue passion is more important than brain power.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
162. “We don’t train executives, we find them. If a mountain stands up like Everest, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that it’s a high mountain.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
163. “Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
164. “If you can get good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
165. “Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
166. “If you always tell people why, they’ll understand it better, they’ll consider it more important, and they’ll be more likely to comply.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
167. “An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it’s more available to you.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
168. “We have found in a long life that one competitor is frequently enough to ruin a business.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
169. “Let me know what your problem is, and I will try to make it more difficult for you.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
170. “The ethos of not fooling yourself is one of the best you could possibly have. It’s powerful because it’s so rare.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
171. “Is there such a thing as a cheerful pessimist? That’s what I am.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
172. “The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It’s like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
173. “If you get into the mental habit of relating what you’re reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
174. “Once you start doing something bad, then it’s easy to take the next step – and in the end, you’re a moral sewer.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
Charlie Munger Quotes on Investing
175. “Fixable but unfixed bad performance is bad character and tends to create more of itself, causing more damage to the excuse giver with each tolerated instance.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
176. “Good businesses can survive a little bad management.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
177. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
178. “The average result has to be the average result. By definition, everybody can’t beat the market. As I always say, the iron rule of life is that only 20% of the people can be in the top fifth. That’s just the way it is.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
179. “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).
180. “Any time anybody offers you anything with a big commission and a 200-page prospectus, don’t buy it. Occasionally, you’ll be wrong if you adopt “Munger’s Rule”. However, over a lifetime, you’ll be a long way ahead-and you will miss a lot of unhappy experiences.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
181. “A few public hangings will really change behavior. One of our Presidents said if he could execute three people each year for no cause, it would make it a lot easier to govern. When someone said that’s not enough, he said, “Oh yes it is, because I’d publish the list of people under consideration.”” ~ (Charlie Munger).
182. “Why should it be easy to do something that, if done well, two or three times, will make your family rich for life?” ~ (Charlie Munger).
183. “The first chance you have to avoid a loss from a foolish loan is by refusing to make it; there is no second chance.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
184. “This is a good life lesson: getting the right people into your system is the most important thing you can do.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
185. “While no real money came down, my family gave me a good education and a marvelous example of how people should behave, and in the end that was more valuable than money. Being surrounded by the right values from the beginning is an immense treasure. Warren had that. It even has a financial advantage.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
186. “After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See’s, we’ve made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners. These opportunity costs don’t show up on financial statements, but have cost us many billions.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
187. “A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
188. “Part of that, I think, is being able to tune out folly, as distinguished from recognizing wisdom. You’ve got whole categories of things you just bat away so your brain isn’t cluttered with them. That way, you’re better able to pick up a few sensible things to do.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
189. “The name of the game is continuing to learn. Even if you’re very well trained and have some natural aptitude, you still need to keep learning.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
190. “The best armor of old age is a well-spent life preceding it.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
191. “We may well have a competitive advantage buying decent businesses at decent prices. But they won’t be fabulous businesses and fabulous prices. There’s too much competition and money out there, with many buyout specialists.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
192. “Being rational is a moral Imperative. You should never be stupider than you need to be.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
193. “I don’t spend much time regretting the past, once I’ve taken my lesson from it. I don’t dwell on it.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
194. “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.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
195. “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).
196. “I regard it as very unfair, but capitalism without failure is like religion without hell.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
197. “If you skillfully follow the multidisciplinary path, you will never wish to come back. It would be like cutting off your hands.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
198. “The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
199. “For years I have read the morning paper and harrumphed. There’s a lot to harrumph about now.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
200. “The tax code gives you an enormous advantage if you can find some things you can just sit with.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
201. “The idea of excessive diversification is madness. Wide diversification, which necessarily includes investment in mediocre businesses, only guarantees ordinary results.” ~ (Charlie Munger).
