Top 300 Charlie Munger Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 5 of 7

201. “We don’t claim to have perfect morals, but at least we have a huge area of things that, while legal, are beneath us. We won’t do them. Currently, there’s a culture in Americathat says that anything that won’t send you to prison is OK.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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. Warrenhad that. It even has a financial advantage.”

— Charlie Munger

208. “The idea of excessive diversification is madness.”

— Charlie Munger

209. “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

210. “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

211. “For years I have read the morning paper and harrumphed. There’s a lot to harrumph about now.”

— Charlie Munger

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

216. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

220. “If you skillfully follow the multidisciplinary path, you will never wish to come back. It would be like cutting off your hands.”

— Charlie Munger

221. “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.”

— Charlie Munger

222. “The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much.”

— Charlie Munger

223. “There’s no way that you can live an adequate life without many mistakes. In fact, one trick in life is to get so you can handle mistakes. Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke.”

— Charlie Munger

224. “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.”

— Charlie Munger

225. “We’re emphasizing the knowable by predicting how certain people and companies will swim against the current. We’re not predicting the fluctuation in the current.”

— Charlie Munger

226. “The number one idea is to view a stock as an ownership of the business and to judge the staying quality of the business in terms of its competitive advantage. Look for more value in terms of discounted future cash-flow than you are paying for. Move only when you have an advantage.”

— Charlie Munger

227. “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.”

— Charlie Munger

228. “If the value of a company doesn’t just scream out at you, it’s too close.”

— Charlie Munger

229. “People always underestimate the ability of earth to increase its carrying capacity.”

— Charlie Munger

230. “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.”

— Charlie Munger

231. “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.”

— Charlie Munger

232. “See’s candy company was the first high-quality business we ever bought.”

— Charlie Munger

233. “Over many decades, our usual practice is that if something we like goes down, we buy more and more. Sometimes something happens, you realize you’re wrong, and you get out. But if you develop correct confidence in your judgment, buy more and take advantage of stock prices.”

— Charlie Munger

234. “With so much money riding on reported numbers, human nature is to manipulate them. And with so many doing it, you get Serpico effects, where everyone rationalizes that it’s okay because everyone else is doing it. It is always thus.”

— Charlie Munger

235. “Our biggest mistakes, were things we didn’t do, companies we didn’t buy.”

— Charlie Munger

236. “I think there’s something to be said for developing the disposition to own stocks without fretting.”

— Charlie Munger

237. “Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It’s expected to be better than the rest. It’s my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it’s also my view that it’s still lousy...”

— Charlie Munger

238. “I always like it when someone attractive to me agrees with me, so I have fond memories of Phil Fisher. The idea that it was hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obviously good idea. But 98% of the investment world doesn’t think this way.”

— Charlie Munger

239. “I think you’ll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad. Even though there are some people who do very well, like Marc Rich-who plainly has never had any decent ethics, or seldom anyway. But in the end, Warren Buffett has done better than Marc Rich-in money-not just in reputation.”

— Charlie Munger

240. “Here’s one truth that perhaps your typical investment counselor would disagree with: if you’re comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.”

— Charlie Munger

241. “The basic concept of value to a private owner and being motivated when you’re buying and selling securities by reference to intrinsic value instead of price momentum – I don’t think that will ever be outdated.”

— Charlie Munger

242. “A lot of share-buying, not bargain-seeking, is designed to prop stock prices up. Thirty to 40 years ago, it was very profitable to look at companies that were aggressively buying their own shares. They were motivated simply to buy below what it was worth.”

— Charlie Munger

243. “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.”

— Charlie Munger

244. “Even if you assume that the whole economy would work better had we never had double taxation, having the envy and resentment of the richest paying low or no taxes screams of injustice. You have to have a fair system.”

— Charlie Munger

245. “We don’t have any miraculous way of avoiding taxes at Wesco and Berkshire.”

— Charlie Munger

246. “Ben Franklin and Samuel Johnson, he credits their wisdom for his success. “They were both utterly brilliant men. And powerful communicators. Both have helped me all the way through life. Their lessons are easy to assimilate.””

— Charlie Munger

247. “To some extent, stocks are like Rembrandts. They sell based on what they’ve sold in the past. Bonds are much more rational. No-one thinks a bond’s value will soar to the moon.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

249. “In the corporate world, if you have analysts, due diligence, and no horse sense, you’ve just described hell.”

— Charlie Munger

250. “Quoting Demosthenes, ‘For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.’ I would rather make money playing a piano in a whorehouse than arguing that no cost is incurred when employees are paid in stock options instead of cash. I am not kidding.”

— Charlie Munger