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You must force yourself to consider opposing arguments. Especially when they challenge your best loved ideas.

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
Especially
Loved
Challenges
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Opposing
Best
Arguments
Ideas
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More quotes by Charlie Munger

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It would be easier to screw up American Express than Coke or Gillette, but it's an immensely strong business.
Charlie Munger
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In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don't give a damn about safety. They let it balloon and balloon and balloon. It's aided by false accounting.
Charlie Munger
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We tend to buy things - a lot of things - where we don't know exactly what will happen, but the outcome will be decent.
Charlie Munger
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It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.
Charlie Munger
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I don't want to sell credit to people who are going to hurt themselves with it. You should only sell products that are good for the people who use them. Some disagree with this, but I know I'm right. That is to say, you're talking to a Republican who admires Elizabeth Warren.
Charlie Munger
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You must have the confidence to override people with more credentials than you whose cognition is impaired by incentive-caused bias or some similar psychological force that is obviously present. But there are also cases where you have to recognize that you have no wisdom to add - and that your best course is to trust some expert.
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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We have found in a long life that one competitor is frequently enough to ruin a business.
Charlie Munger
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Financial institutions make us nervous when they're trying to do well.
Charlie Munger
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If you can get good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.
Charlie Munger
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You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader.
Charlie Munger
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Stock-picking is like gambling: those who win well, seldom bet, but when they do, they bet heavily.
Charlie Munger
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Beta and modern portfolio theory and the like - none of it makes any sense to me.
Charlie Munger
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Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.
Charlie Munger
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I think there's an awful lot of twaddle and bullshit on EVA. The whole game is to turn retained earnings into more earnings. EVA has ideas about cost of capital that make no sense. Of course, if a company generates high returns on capital and can maintain this over time, it will do well. But the mental system as a whole does not work.
Charlie Munger
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It's a rare business that doesn't have a way worse future than it has a past.
Charlie Munger
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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].
Charlie Munger
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The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It's like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.
Charlie Munger
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To atone, I teach and try to set an example... I love spreading this stuff around. Just because it's trite doesn't mean it isn't right. In fact, I like to say, 'If it's trite, it's right.'
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