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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.

Charlie Munger

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Charlie Munger
Age: 100
Born: 1924
Born: January 1
Business Person
Financier
Investor
Lawyer
Omaha
Nebraska
Charlie Thomas Munger
Charles T. Munger
Charles Thomas Munger
Gold
Vienna
Family
Garments
Great
Invest
Thing
Businesses
Think
Onto
Thinking
Jewish
People
Civilized
Productive

More quotes by Charlie Munger

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If you always tell people why, they'll understand it better, they'll consider it more important, and they'll be more likely to comply.
Charlie Munger
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A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.
Charlie Munger
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It would be nice if this [finding really cheap stocks] happened all the time. Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Charlie Munger
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...all man's desired geometric progressions, if a high rate of growth is chosen, at last come to grief on a finite earth. And the social system for man on earth is fair enough, eventually, that almost all massive cheating ends in disgrace.
Charlie Munger
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Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.
Charlie Munger
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It's in the nature of stock markets to go way down from time to time. There's no system to avoid bad markets. You can't do it unless you try to time the market, which is a seriously dumb thing to do. Conservative investing with steady savings without expecting miracles is the way to go.
Charlie Munger
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If you don't keep learning, other people will pass you by. Temperament alone won't do it - you need a lot of curiosity for a long, long time.
Charlie Munger
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We have a higher percentage of the intelligentsia engaged in buying and selling pieces of paper and promoting trading activity than in any past era. A lot of what I see now reminds me of Sodomand Gomorrah. You get activity feeding on itself, envy and imitation. It has happened in the past that there came bad consequences.
Charlie Munger
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How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind?... I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what's right in psychology.
Charlie Munger
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We have a passion for keeping things simple.
Charlie Munger
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It is an unfortunate fact that great and foolish excess can come into prices of common stocks in the aggregate. They are valued partly like bonds, based on roughly rational projections of use value in producing future cash. But they are also valued partly like Rembrandt paintings, purchased mostly because their prices have gone up, so far.
Charlie Munger
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So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.
Charlie Munger
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If you skillfully follow the multidisciplinary path, you will never wish to come back. It would be like cutting off your hands.
Charlie Munger
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People calculate too much and think too little.
Charlie Munger
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Darwin paid particular attention to disconfirming evidence. Objectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you're going to be a great thinker.
Charlie Munger
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I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it indeed, especially when one doesn't like it.
Charlie Munger
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It's natural that you'd have more brains going into money management. There are so many huge incomes in money management and investment banking - it's like ants to sugar. There are huge incentives for a man to take up money management as opposed to, say, physics, and it's a lot easier.
Charlie Munger
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It took us months of buying all the Coke stock we could to accumulate $1 billion worth - equal to 7% of the company. It's very hard to accumulate major positions.
Charlie Munger
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It's human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it's terrible that managements go along with this.
Charlie Munger
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I know just enough about thermodynamics to understand that if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that's a very stupid way to solve an energy problem.
Charlie Munger