Top 300 Charlie Munger Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “There’s more honor in investment management than in investment banking.”

— Charlie Munger

252. “I find it quite useful to think of a free-market economy – or partly free market economy – as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem. Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well.”

— Charlie Munger

253. “There is the sheer amount of Franklin’s wisdom. And the talent. Franklin played four instruments. He was the nation’s leading scientist and inventor, plus a leading author, statesman, and philanthropist. There has never been anyone like him.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

255. “A director who gets $150,000 per year from a company and needs the money is not independent.”

— Charlie Munger

256. “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

257. “It’s a finite and very competitive world. All large aggregations of capital eventually find it hell on earth to grow and thus find a lower rate of return.”

— Charlie Munger

258. “Berkshire’s past record has been almost ridiculous. If Berkshirehad used even half the leverage of, say, Rupert Murdoch, it would be five times its current size.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

260. “The investment game is getting more and more competitive.”

— Charlie Munger

261. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

263. “It’s dangerous to short stocks.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

265. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

267. “Berkshireis in the business of making easy predictions If a deal looks too hard, the partners simply shelve it.”

— Charlie Munger

268. “We tend to buy things – a lot of things – where we don’t know exactly what will happen, but the outcome will be decent.”

— Charlie Munger

269. “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

270. “To say accounting for derivatives is Americais a sewer is an insult to sewage.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

272. “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

273. “How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it?”

— Charlie Munger

274. “I call myself the assistant cult leader.”

— Charlie Munger

275. “Common stock investors can make money by predicting the outcomes of practice evolution. You can’t derive this by fundamental analysis – you must think biologically.”

— Charlie Munger

276. “Fancy computers are engaging in legalized front-running. The profits are clearly coming from the rest of us – our college endowments and our pensions. Why is this legal? What the hell is the government thinking? It’s like letting rats into a restaurant.”

— Charlie Munger

277. “Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment – and lord knows I’ve created a good bit of it – I don’t think I’ve created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with.”

— Charlie Munger

278. “In Gillette’s case, they keep surfing along new technology which is fairly simple by the standards of microchips. But it’s hard for competitors to do. So they’ve been able to stay constantly near the edge of improvements in shaving.”

— Charlie Munger

279. “The stupid and dishonest accountants allowed the genie of totally inappropriate accounting to descend on derivatives books. And once this has happened – people get status, etc. – it’s impossible to get it back into the bottle.”

— Charlie Munger

280. “Trying to prioritize among things we’re unlikely to do is pretty fruitless.”

— Charlie Munger

281. “If you want good behavior, don’t pay on a commission basis. Our judges aren’t paid so much a case. We keep them pretty well isolated with a fixed salary. Judges in this whole thing have come out pretty well – there have been relatively few scandals.”

— Charlie Munger

282. “Well in the history of the See’s Candy Company they always say, “I never did it before, and I’m never going to do it again.” And we cashier them. It would be evil not to, because terrible behavior spreads.”

— Charlie Munger

283. “I don’t think vengeance is much good.”

— Charlie Munger

284. “If it happens every year like clockwork, what’s so extraordinary about it?”

— Charlie Munger

285. “For some odd reason, I had an early and extreme multidisciplinary cast of mind. I couldn’t stand reaching for a small idea in my own discipline when there was a big idea right over the fence in somebody else’s discipline. So I just grabbed in all directions for the big ideas that would really work.”

— Charlie Munger

286. “Strategic plans cause more dumb decisions than anything else in America.”

— Charlie Munger

287. “Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa.”

— Charlie Munger

288. “In the 1930s, there as a stretch here you could borrow more against the real estate than you could sell it for. I think that’s hat’s going on in today’s private-equity world.”

— Charlie Munger

289. “At Berkshire Hathaway we do not like to compete against Chinese manufacturers.”

— Charlie Munger

290. “I think the idea that the hedge fund manager gets lower taxes than the taxi driver or the physics professor is insane. The legislators who leave that policy in place are derelict in their duties to be rational and fair. There are plenty of them in both political parties. It’s totally outrageous.”

— Charlie Munger

291. “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.”

— Charlie Munger

292. “Our success has come from the lack of oversight we’ve provided, and our success will continue to be from a lack of oversight. But if you’re going to provide minimal oversight, you have to buy carefully. It’s a different model from GE’s. GE’s works – it’s just very different from ours.”

— Charlie Munger

293. “I see almost no change in the price of the composite product that flows through Costco I don’t feel sorry for the people who pay $27 million for an 8,000-square-foot condo in Manhattan. So inflation comes in places.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

295. “It’s a rare business that doesn’t have a way worse future than it has a past.”

— Charlie Munger

296. “I would argue that a majority of the horrors we face would not have happened if the accounting profession developed and enforced better accounting.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

298. “You must value the business in order to value the stock.”

— Charlie Munger

299. “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.”

— Charlie Munger

300. “We have never had the will to enforce the immigration laws. What you see is what you’ll continue to get.”

— Charlie Munger