Top 300 Charlie Munger Quotes (2024 Update)
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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. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

209. “I’d rather throw a viper down my shirt front than hire a compensation consultant.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

211. “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

212. “Of course the self-serving bias is something you want to get out of yourself. Thinking that what’s good for you is good for the wider civilization and rationalizing all these ridiculous conclusions based on this subconscious tendency to serve one’s self is a terribly inaccurate way to think.”

— Charlie Munger

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “We look for a horse with one chance in two of winning and which pays you three to one.”

— Charlie Munger

218. “We’re the tortoise that has outrun the hare because it chose the easy predictions.”

— Charlie Munger

219. “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

220. “You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.”

— Charlie Munger

221. “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

222. “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

223. “It’s human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it’s terrible that managements go along with this.”

— Charlie Munger

224. “I don’t want to understand Facebook.”

— Charlie Munger

225. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “The total amount paid out in dividends is roughly equal to the amount lost in trading and investment advice, so net dividends to shareholders are zero. This is a very peculiar way to run a republic.”

— Charlie Munger

247. “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

248. “I do not think you can trust bankers to control themselves. They are like heroin addicts.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger