"You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention."
"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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Source: Academic Economics: Strengths and Faults After Considering Interdisciplinary Needs. Charlie Munger's Herb Kay Undergraduate Lecture at the Economics Department of University of California in Santa Barbara, October 3, 2003.
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"The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more."
"Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs."
"What do you want to avoid? Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If you're unreliable it doesn't matter what your virtues are. You're going to crater immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability."
"Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean."
"I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span."