Inspirational Quotes by Charlie Munger (American Investor, Philanthropist)

If only I had the influence with my wife and children that I have in some other quarters!
—Charlie Munger

Thinking that what’s good for you is good for the wider civilization, and rationalizing foolish or evil conduct, based on your subconscious tendency to serve yourself, is a terrible way to think.
—Charlie Munger

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

No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.
—Charlie Munger

I think track records are very important. If you start early trying to have a perfect one in some simple thing like honesty, you’re well on your way to success in this world.
—Charlie Munger

The really big ideas carry ninety-five percent of the freight.
—Charlie Munger

No CEO examining books today understands what the hell is going on.
—Charlie Munger

Over the long term, it’s hard for a stock to earn a much better return that the business which underlies it earns. If the business earns six percent on capital over forty years and you hold it for that forty years, you’re not going to make much different than a six percent return—even if you originally buy it at a huge discount. Conversely, if a business earns eighteen percent on capital over twenty or thirty years, even if you pay an expensive looking price, you’ll end up with one hell of a result.
—Charlie Munger

If you always tell people why, they’ll understand it better, they’ll consider it more important, and they’ll be more likely to comply.
—Charlie Munger

I’m right, and you’re smart, and sooner or later you’ll see I’m right.
—Charlie Munger

Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.
—Charlie Munger

For society, the Internet is wonderful, but for capitalists, it will be a net negative. It will increase efficiency, but lots of things increase efficiency without increasing profits. It is way more likely to make American businesses less profitable than more profitable. This is perfectly obvious, but very little understood.
—Charlie Munger

Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.
—Charlie Munger

Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.
—Charlie Munger

The desire to get rich fast is pretty dangerous.”
—Charlie Munger

I’ve seen so much folly and stupidity on the part of our major philanthropic groups, including the World Bank. I really have more confidence in building up the more capitalistic ventures like Costco.
—Charlie Munger

The liabilities are always 100 percent good. It’s the assets you have to worry about.
—Charlie Munger

In a democracy, everyone takes turns. But if you really want a lot of wisdom, it’s better to concentrate decisions and process in one person. It’s no accident that Singapore has a much better record, given where it started, than the United States. There, power was concentrated in an enormously talented person, Lee Kuan Yew, who was the Warren Buffett of Singapore.
—Charlie Munger

Everywhere there is a large commission, there is a high probability of a rip-off.
—Charlie Munger

You’re looking for a mispriced gamble. That’s what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That’s value investing.
—Charlie Munger

If you don’t allow for self-serving bias in the conduct of others, you are, again, a fool.
—Charlie Munger

All intelligent investing is value investing—acquiring more than you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.
—Charlie Munger

Throughout his life, a wise man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as a sort of duty to his better self. If he reduces the number of skills he practices and, therefore, the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency. … Skills of a very high order can be maintained only with daily practice.
—Charlie Munger

We’ve really made the money out of high quality businesses. In some cases, we bought the whole business. And in some cases, we just bought a big block of stock. But when you analyze what happened, the big money’s been made in the high quality businesses. And most of the other people who’ve made a lot of money have done so in high quality businesses.
—Charlie Munger

There are always people who will be better at something than you are. You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader.
—Charlie Munger

I’m a great believer in solving hard problems by using a checklist. You need to get all the likely and unlikely answers before you; otherwise it’s easy to miss something important.
—Charlie Munger

In my life there are not that many questions I can’t properly deal with using my $40 adding machine and dog-eared compound interest table.
—Charlie Munger
Topics: Simplicity

Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa.
—Charlie Munger

Intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you’re really going to excel in it.
—Charlie Munger

I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.
—Charlie Munger

If you get a lot of heavy ideology young — and then you start expressing it — you are really locking your brain into a very unfortunate pattern.
—Charlie Munger

Assume life will be really tough, and then ask if you can handle it. If the answer is yes, you’ve won.
—Charlie Munger

There is no better teacher than history in determining the future… There are answers worth billions of dollars in $30 history book.
—Charlie Munger

I believe Costco does more for civilization than the Rockefeller Foundation. I think it’s a better place. You get a bunch of very intelligent people sitting around trying to do good, I immediately get kind of suspicious and squirm in my seat.
—Charlie Munger

If you make yourself a very reliable person and stay reliable all your life, faithfully doing whatever you engage to do, it will be very hard for you to fail at anything you want.
—Charlie Munger

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like [Warren Buffett and myself] have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
—Charlie Munger

You need a different checklist and mental models for different companies. I can never make it easy by saying, ‘Here are three things.’ You have to derive it yourself to ingrain it in your head for the rest of your life.
—Charlie Munger

A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.
—Charlie Munger

Life, in part, is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much-loved hand— you must learn to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds.
—Charlie Munger

There’s danger in just shoveling out money to people who say, ‘My life is a little harder than it used to be.’ At a certain place you’ve got to say to the people, ‘Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.’
—Charlie Munger

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