11 CHARLIE MUNGER quotes I like
March 26, 2019•424 words
“It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, “It’s the strong swimmers who drown.”
—CHARLIE MUNGER, WESCO ANNUAL REPORT, 1989
What’s the flip side, what can go wrong that I haven’t seen?
—CHARLIE MUNGER, FORBES, 1969”
“The idea that everyone can have wonderful results from stocks is inherently crazy. Nobody expects everyone to succeed at poker.
—CHARLIE MUNGER, DAILY JOURNAL MEETING, 2013
If [investing] weren’t a little difficult, everybody would be rich.
—CHARLIE MUNGER, DAMN RIGHT, 2000
For a security to be mispriced, someone else must be a damn fool. It may be bad for the world, but not bad for Berkshire.
—CHARLIE MUNGER, WESCO ANNUAL MEETING, 2008”
“Most people who try [investing] don’t do well at it. But the trouble is that if even 90 percent are no good, everyone looks around and says, “I’m the 10 percent.”
—CHARLIE MUNGER, WESCO ANNUAL MEETING, 2004”
It’s a very simple set of ideas and the reason that our ideas have not spread faster is they’re too simple. The professional classes can’t justify their existence if that’s all they have to say.
—CHARLIE MUNGER, BBC INTERVIEW, 2009
I don’t let others do projections for me, because I don’t like throwing up on the desk.
—CHARLIE MUNGER, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA, 2003”
What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the 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.
—CHARLIE MUNGER, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (USC) BUSINESS SCHOOL, 1994
You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines, and use them routinely—all of them, not just a few. Most people are trained in one model—economics, for example—and try to solve all problems in one way. You know the old saying: to the man with a hammer, the world looks like a nail. This is a dumb way of handling problems.
—CHARLIE MUNGER, WESCO ANNUAL MEETING, 2000
All the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads.
—CHARLIE MUNGER, USC BUSINESS SCHOOL, 1994
Source: Tren Griffin “Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing)