Top 300 Charlie Munger Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “We have to have a special insight, or we’ll put it in the ‘too tough’ basket. All of you have to look for a special area of competency and focus on that.”

— Charlie Munger

302. “It would be one of the most irritating experiences in the world to do a lot of work to uncover a fraud and then at have it go from X to 3X and at h the crooks happily partying with your money while you’re meeting margin calls. Why would you want to go within hailing distance of that?”

— Charlie Munger

303. “A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another.”

— Charlie Munger

304. “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

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

— Charlie Munger

306. “No CEO examining books today understands what the hell is going on.”

— Charlie Munger

307. “I don’t invest in what I don’t understand. And I don’t want to understand Facebook.”

— Charlie Munger

308. “One of the smartest things a person can do is dampen investment expectations, especially with Berkshire. That would be mature and responsible. I like our model and we should do nicely.”

— Charlie Munger

309. “I think the main figure that matters to all of us, including people in the media, is: How does GDP per capita grow? And those figures have been very good. There is a huge flux both up and down, so it isn’t like we’re all static in status. What’s important is that pie grows.”

— Charlie Munger

310. “The interesting thing is the field is so big – it’s enormous. One thing a modern civilization needs is energy.”

— Charlie Munger

311. “We have a history when things are really horrible of wading in when no one else will.”

— Charlie Munger

312. “I’m a bull on Berkshire Hathaway. There may be some considerable waiting, but I think there are some good days ahead.”

— Charlie Munger

313. “I think corporate managers should learn to be better investors because it would make them better managers.”

— Charlie Munger

314. “I bet Richard Fuld doesn’t have an ounce of contrition. It’s just megalomania. When it’s like that, you need rules to prevent catastrophe. When banks are borrowing the government’s credit rating, you need rules to prevent stupid things.”

— Charlie Munger

315. “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

316. “In fact I’ve probably never seen such a wide moat.”

— Charlie Munger

317. “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

318. “In the LBO field there is a buried “covariance” with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.”

— Charlie Munger

319. “Being short and seeing a promoter take the stock up is very irritating. It’s not worth it to have that much irritation in your life.”

— Charlie Munger

320. “As I continued through Cicero’s pages, I found much more material celebrating my way of life...”

— Charlie Munger

321. “I think the notion that liquidity of tradable common stock is a great contributor to capitalism is mostly twaddle. The liquidity gives us these crazy booms, so it has as many problems as virtues.”

— Charlie Munger

322. “I’ve heard that one-half of the students at elite schools want to go into private equity or hedge funds. They want to keep up with their age cohorts at Goldman. This can’t possibly end well in terms of meeting these expectations.”

— Charlie Munger

323. “Well, the questioner came from Singapore which has perhaps the best economic record in the history of developing an economy and therefore he referred to 15% per annum as modest. It’s not modest-it’s arrogant. Only someone from Singapore would call it modest.”

— Charlie Munger

324. “If mutual fund directors are independent, then I’m the lead character in the Bolshoi Ballet.”

— Charlie Munger

325. “Financial institutions make us nervous when they’re trying to do well.”

— Charlie Munger

326. “A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: “You don’t seem smart enough to be so good at what you’re doing. Do you have an explanation?””

— Charlie Munger

327. “It takes almost no capital to open a new See’s candy store. We’re drowning in capital of our own that has almost no cost. It would be crazy to franchise stores like some capital-starved pancake house. We like owning our own stores as a matter of quality control.”

— Charlie Munger

328. “Like the stocks of both Berkshire and Wesco to trade within hailing distance of what we think of as intrinsic value. When it runs up, we try to talk it down. That’s not at all common in Corporate America, but that’s the way we act.”

— Charlie Munger

329. “Wells Fargo behaves better than the average big bank. But nobody’s perfect.”

— Charlie Munger

330. “The old culture had come out of poverty, out of English customs.”

— Charlie Munger

331. “A lot of our respected financial institutions are just casinos in drag.”

— Charlie Munger

332. “Expect hogs to eat a lot more in the presence of a lot of hog wash.”

— Charlie Munger

333. “I feel that by getting rich in the way I did, I think my own example has hurt my own country.”

— Charlie Munger

334. “We only want what success we can get despite encouraging others to share our general views about reality.”

— Charlie Munger

335. “Always take the high road, it’s far less crowded.”

— Charlie Munger

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

— Charlie Munger

337. “You don’t have to pee on an electric fence to learn not to do it.”

— Charlie Munger