Quotes Charlie Munger - page 3
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There has never been a master plan. Anyone who wanted to do it, we fired because it takes on a life of its own and doesn't cover new reality. We want people taking into account new information.
Spend less than you make; always be saving something. Put it into a tax-deferred account. Over time, it will begin to amount to something. This is such a no-brainer.
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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Where you have complexity, by nature you can have fraud and mistakes. You'll have more of that than in a company that shovels sand from a river and sells it. This will always be true of financial companies, including ones run by governments. If you want accurate numbers from financial companies, you're in the wrong world.
We don't have an isolated group [of senior managers] surrounded by servants. Berkshire's headquarters is a tiny little suite. We just came back from Berkshire's board meeting; it had moved up to the board room of the Kiewit company and [it was so large and luxurious that] I felt uncomfortable.
Most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They become people of whom Philip Wylie observed: "You couldn't 't squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn.
If you rise in life, you have to behave in a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you're a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you're the Bishop of Boston, you shouldn't go.
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.
We believe there should be a huge area between everything you should do and everything you can do without getting into legal trouble. I don't think you should come anywhere near that line. We don't deserve much credit for this. It helps us make more money. I'd like to believe that we'd behave well even if it didn't work. But more often, we've made extra money from doing the right thing. Ben Franklin said I'm not moral because of it's the right thing to do - but because it's the best policy.
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.
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?
I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I'm not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who support it. I think only when I've reached that state am I qualified to speak. This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is a very, very important thing in life
Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group then to hell with them.
The only intelligence investing is value investing...to acquire more than one is paying for.
And, partly, I had found that theory-structure was a superpower in helping one get what one wanted. As I had early discovered in school wherein I had excelled without labor, guided by theory, while many others, without mastery of theory failed despite monstrous effort. Better theory I thought had always worked for me and, if now available could make me acquire capital and independence faster and better assist everything I loved.
We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.
At most corporations if you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You've got denial, you've got everything in the world. You've got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. And by the way, I do the same thing routinely.
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![The beauty of a financial institution is that there are a lot of ways to go to hell in a bucket. You can push credit too far, do a dumb acquisition, leverage yourself excessively - it\'s not just derivatives [that can bring about your downfall].](/fotos/f6/f6b5d4dd7645731a9a6996cfec1391c3.webp)
Look at those hedge funds - you think they can wait? They don't know how to wait! I have sat for years at a time with $10 to $12 million in treasuries or municipals, just waiting, waiting...As Jesse Livermore said, 'The big money is not in the buying and selling...but in the waiting.'
