Top 300 Charlie Munger Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Warren spends 70 hours a week thinking about investing .”

— Charlie Munger

153. “Beta and modern portfolio theory and the like – none of it makes any sense to me.”

— Charlie Munger

154. “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

155. “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.”

— Charlie Munger

156. “If it is wisdom you’re after, you’re going to spend a lot of time on your ass reading.”

— Charlie Munger

157. “We have found in a long life that one competitor is frequently enough to ruin a business.”

— Charlie Munger

158. “Don’t do cocaine. Don’t race trains. And avoid AIDS situations.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

160. “Good businesses can survive a little bad management.”

— Charlie Munger

161. “It’s in the nature of stock markets to go way down from time to time. There’s no system to avoid bad markets. You can’t do it unless you try to time the market, which is a seriously dumb thing to do. Conservative investing with steady savings without expecting miracles is the way to go.”

— Charlie Munger

162. “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.”

— Charlie Munger

163. “Stock-picking is like gambling: those who win well, seldom bet, but when they do, they bet heavily.”

— Charlie Munger

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “This is a good life lesson: getting the right people into your system is the most important thing you can do.”

— Charlie Munger

170. “An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it’s more available to you.”

— Charlie Munger

171. “Being rational is a moral Imperative. You should never be stupider than you need to be.”

— Charlie Munger

172. “The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.”

— Charlie Munger

173. “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

174. “Capitalism is a pretty brutal place.”

— Charlie Munger

175. “We have the same problem as everyone else: It’s very hard to predict the future...”

— Charlie Munger

176. “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

177. “Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.”

— Charlie Munger

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “The liabilities are always 100 percent good. It’s the assets you have to worry about.”

— Charlie Munger

182. “There are worse situations than drowning in cash and sitting, sitting, sitting. I remember when I wasn’t awash in cash – and I don’t want to go back.”

— Charlie Munger

183. “Is there such thing as a cheerful pessimist? That’s what I am.”

— Charlie Munger

184. “I remember the $0.05 hamburger and a $0.40-per-hour minimum wage, so I’ve seen a tremendous amount of inflation in my lifetime. Did it ruin the investment climate? I think not.”

— Charlie Munger

185. “Avoid working directly under somebody you don’t admire and don’t want to be like.”

— Charlie Munger

186. “What matters most: passion or competence that was born in? Berkshireis full of people who have a peculiar passion for their own business. I would argue passion is more important than brain power.”

— Charlie Munger

187. “It’s stupid the way people extrapolate the past – and not slightly stupid, but massively stupid.”

— Charlie Munger

188. “I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it.”

— Charlie Munger

189. “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

190. “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

191. “The investment game always involves considering both quality and price, and the trick is to get more quality than you pay for in price. It’s just that simple.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

193. “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

194. “It’s not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ones.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

196. “I regard it as very unfair, but capitalism without failure is like religion without hell.”

— Charlie Munger

197. “In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables – like the discount warehouses of Costco.”

— Charlie Munger

198. “One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year.”

— Charlie Munger

199. “You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies. I can never make it easy by saying, ‘Here are three things.’ You have to derive it yourself to ingrain it in your head for the rest of your life.”

— Charlie Munger

200. “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