"I won’t bet $100 against house odds between now and the grave."
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Quote collection
Charlie Munger quotes (page 21 of 26)
517 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I don't want to understand Facebook."
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"I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it. Some people, like some of the women I know, have a black belt in spending. They were born with that. But what they gave me was a black belt in chutzpah."
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"Our biggest mistakes, were things we didn't do, companies we didn't buy."
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"Obviously if you want to get good at something which is competitive, you have to think about it and practice a lot. You have to keep learning because world keeps changing and competitors keep learning. You have to go to bed wiser than you got up. As you try to master what you are trying to do – people who do that almost never fail utterly. Very few have ever failed with that approach. You may rise slowly, but you are sure to rise."
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"You have to realize the truth of biologist Julian Huxley's idea that 'Life is just one damn relatedness after another' "So you must have the models, and you must see the relatedness and the effects from the relatedness."
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"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."
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"Trying to prioritize among things we're unlikely to do is pretty fruitless."
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"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."
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"If all you succeed in doing in life is getting rich by buying little pieces of paper, it's a failed life. Life is more than being shrewd in wealth accumulation."
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"If you can buy the best companies, over time the pricing takes care of itself."
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"The old culture had come out of poverty, out of English customs."
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"Choose clients as you would friends."
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"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."
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"And your brain doesn't naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows how to play bridge. "for example," people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Well maybe a great bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that's a trained response. Ordinary people, subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies."
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"It is way less certain to be a wonderful business in the future. The threat is alternative mediums of information. Every newspaper is scrambling to parlay their existing advantage into dominance on the Internet. But it is way less sure [that this will occur] than the certainty 20 years ago that the basic business would grow steadily, so there's more downside risk. The perfectly fabulous economics of this business could become grievously impaired."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I don't have too much interest in teaching other people how to get rich. And that isn't because I fear the competition or anything like that - Warrenhas always been very open about what he's learned, and I share that ethos. My personal behavior model is Lord Keynes: I wanted to get rich so I could be independent, and so I could do other things like give talks on the intersection of psychology and economics. I didn't want to turn it into a total obsession."
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"Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay were caricatures - they were easy to spot. They were almost psychopaths. But it's much harder to spot problems at companies like Royal Dutch [Shell]."
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