Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,159,190 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Charlie Munger
19 quotes
“... much of what is taught in modern corporate finance courses is twaddle.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1996 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, YouTube video with quote at 2:41:46 of 4:54:01 in video
“The first $100,000 is a bitch, but you gotta do it. I don’t care what you have to do — if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn’t purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Berkshire Hathaway’s 1998 Annual General Meeting (AGM). Compare John Jacob Astor.
“The hard part of the process for most people is the first $100,000. If you have a standing start at zero, getting together $100,000 is a long struggle for most people.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Afternoon Session - Berkshire Hathaway’s 1999 Meeting
“You have to learn all the big ideas in the key disciplines in a way that they're in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life. If you do that, I solemnly promise you that one day you'll be walking down the street and you'll look to your right and left and you’ll think "my heavenly days, I'm now one of the few competent people in my whole age cohort." If you don't do it, many of the brightest of you will live in the middle ranks or in the shallows.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: USC Law School Commencement Speech (2007-05-13)
“Our investment style has been given a name - focus investing - which implies ten holdings, not one hundred or four hundred. The idea that it is hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obvious idea. But 98% of the investment world does not think this way. It's been good for us.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Poor Charlie's Almanack, p. 100 (1st edition, 2005; 2nd edition, 2008)
“You can't give the average Wall Street CEO really lenient standards of accounting and expect the figures to be good. The accountant is like the referee in soccer. The accountant has to be the adult that prevents the mayhem. Accountants don't want to be the adults because it causes liability, it causes responsibility, it causes difficulty ... they failed us terribly.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How do these super-smart people with all these degrees and higher mathematics end up doing these dumb things? I think it's explainable by the old proverb that to the man with a hammer every problem looks pretty much like a nail. They've learned these techniques and they just twist the problem so it fits the solution — which is not the way to do it.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (quote at 3:05:17 of 4:28:07, posted on YouTube in June 2019)
“Neither Warren nor I have ever used any fancy math in business — and neither did Ben Graham who taught Warren. Everything I have ever done in business could be done with the simplest algebra and geometry and addition and multiplication and so forth. I never used calculus for any practical work in my whole damn life — and I was a perfect whiz at it when they taught it to me.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I see [Bitcoin as] an artificial speculative medium that people are buying just because they think they can sell it to somebody else at a higher price, even though it inherently has no intrinsic value. So, I regard the whole business as anti-social, stupid, immoral. [...] I regard the thing as a combination of dementia and immorality, and I think the people that are pushing it are a disgrace.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Yahoo Finance interview with Andrew Serwer, May 7, 2018 (at 17:00)
“... I regard it as a cinch that a great nation will in due time be Rome. ... Where is Rome? Where is Britain in its heyday? They all pass and so our turn is bound to come some day.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment. You don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles, you deal with reliable people, and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Charlie Munger on the secret to a long and happy life, which is “easy, because it’s so simple.” (Feb 24 2019)
“I don't think that she knows who Adam Smith was.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Charlie Munger on Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (May 9, 2019)
“What I would say is the single most important thing, if you want to avoid all the stupid errors, is knowing where you're competent and where you aren't. And that's very hard to do because the human mind naturally tries to make you think you're way smarter than you are.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You fix what can be fixed, and what can't be fixed you endure.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We don't want to make our money selling things that are bad for people.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor (2015) — Charlie Munger, Tren Griffin
“Obviously, 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. And it's not that hard to understand. But you have to know enough about it to understand its limitations — because although accounting is the starting place, it's only a crude approximation. And it's not very hard to understand its limitations. For example, everyone can see that you have to more or less just guess at the useful life of a jet airplane or anything like that. Just because you express the depreciation rate in neat numbers doesn't make it anything you really know.”
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) said by 2023 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source