Top 300 Charlie Munger Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

253. “Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it’s actually you who are ruining your life. It’s such a simple idea. Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to make go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in anyway, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can – the so-called “iron prescription.”

— Charlie Munger

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

271. “It’s hard to predict what will happen with two brands in a market. Sometimes they will behave in a gentlemanly way, and sometimes they’ll pound each other. I know of no way to predict whether they’ll compete moderately or to the death. If you could figure it out, you could make a lot of money.”

— Charlie Munger

272. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

275. “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

276. “It’s amazing how intelligent it is just to spend some time sitting. A lot of people are way too active.”

— Charlie Munger

277. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

280. “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

281. “The theory of modern education is that you need a general education before you specialize. And I think to some extent, before you’re going to be a great stock picker, you need some general education.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

290. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

294. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

296. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

298. “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

299. “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

300. “A board member should be perfectly willing to leave at any time and willing to make the tough calls.”

— Charlie Munger