Quote

Just keep your head down and do your best.

Charlie Munger

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Head
Keep
Best

More quotes by Charlie Munger

Image
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
Image
A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
Charlie Munger
Image
You don't want to be like the motion picture exec who had so many people at his funeral, but they were there just make sure he was dead. Or how about the guy who, at his funeral, the priest said, Won't anyone stand up and say anything nice for the deceased? and finally someone said, Well, his brother was worse.
Charlie Munger
Image
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.
Charlie Munger
Image
If only I had the influence with my wife and children that I have in some other quarters!
Charlie Munger
Image
The liabilities are always 100 percent good. It's the assets you have to worry about.
Charlie Munger
Image
You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth.
Charlie Munger
Image
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.
Charlie Munger
Image
Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.
Charlie Munger
Image
I bet Richard Fuld doesn't have an ounce of contrition. It's just megalomania. When it's like that, you need rules to prevent catastrophe. When banks are borrowing the government's credit rating, you need rules to prevent stupid things.
Charlie Munger
Image
We have the same problem as everyone else: It's very hard to predict the future.
Charlie Munger
Image
The general systems of money management [today] require people to pretend to do something they can't do and like something they don't. It's a terrible way to spend your life, but it's very well paid.
Charlie Munger
Image
If you get into the mental habit of relating what you're reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom.
Charlie Munger
Image
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.
Charlie Munger
Image
We don't have any miraculous way of avoiding taxes at Wesco and Berkshire.
Charlie Munger
Image
A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.
Charlie Munger
Image
there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.
Charlie Munger
Image
Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke: you have made an enormous commitment to something. You have poured effort and money in. And the more you put in, the more that the whole consistency principle makes you think, Now it has to work. If I put in just a little more, then it will work.
Charlie Munger
Image
Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.
Charlie Munger
Image
A lot of share-buying, not bargain-seeking, is designed to prop stock prices up. Thirty to 40 years ago, it was very profitable to look at companies that were aggressively buying their own shares. They were motivated simply to buy below what it was worth.
Charlie Munger