Quote

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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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
Activity
Imitation
Paper
Eras
Intelligentsia
Pieces
Consequences
Percentage
Higher
Buying
Percentages
Came
Engaged
Reminds
Happened
Envy
Trading
Past
Selling
Promoting
Consequence
Feeding

More quotes by Charlie Munger

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Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.
Charlie Munger
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[Lawyers who file class-action securities suits] is not a group you would want to marry into your family. That said, more than half the time the people being sued by the Lerach firm are guilty of outrageous conduct. The problem is, they don't mind (suing) the other half. They are an equal opportunity litigator.
Charlie Munger
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Tthe first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.... You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life.
Charlie Munger
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If the technology hadn't changed, they [newspapers] would still be great businesses. Network TV [in its heyday], anyone could run and do well. If Tom Murphy as running it, you'd do very well, but even your idiot nephew could do well. Fortunately, carbide cutting tools [such as those made by Iscar] don't have these types of substitutes.
Charlie Munger
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The ethos of not fooling yourself is one of the best you could possibly have. It's powerful because it's so rare.
Charlie Munger
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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
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Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.
Charlie Munger
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A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another.
Charlie Munger
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The first chance you have to avoid a loss from a foolish loan is by refusing to make it there is no second chance.
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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Intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you're really going to excel in it.
Charlie Munger
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I'm not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I've reached that state.
Charlie Munger
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There are a lot of things in life way more important than money. All that said, some people do get confused. I play golf with a man who says, What good is health? You can't buy money with it.
Charlie Munger
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While no real money came down, my family gave me a good education and a marvelous example of how people should behave, and in the end that was more valuable than money. Being surrounded by the right values from the beginning is an immense treasure. Warrenhad that. It even has a financial advantage.
Charlie Munger
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I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues - they may know a lot of French however.
Charlie Munger
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It's stupid the way people extrapolate the past -- and not slightly stupid, but massively stupid.
Charlie Munger
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The investment game is getting more and more competitive.
Charlie Munger
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You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.
Charlie Munger
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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.
Charlie Munger
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Almost all good businesses engage in 'pain today, gain tomorrow' activities.
Charlie Munger