Charlie Munger quotes

Charlie Munger was an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist, best known as the longtime vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. His partnership with Warren Buffett played a pivotal role in shaping modern value investing. He was widely respected for his wisdom, wit, and multidisciplinary approach to thinking. Here are 22 of his quotes:

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)
We don't want to make our money selling things that are bad for people. View quote
Charlie Munger
I'm proud to be associated with the value system at Berkshire Hathaway; I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad. View quote
Charlie Munger
I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right. View quote
Charlie Munger
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. View quote
Charlie Munger
... 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. View quote
Charlie Munger
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. View quote
Charlie Munger
... much of what is taught in modern corporate finance courses is twaddle. View quote
Charlie Munger
There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking. View quote
Charlie Munger
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. View quote
Charlie Munger
You fix what can be fixed, and what can't be fixed you endure. (Charlie Munger)
A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price. View quote
Charlie Munger
I think gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses. View quote
Charlie Munger
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. View quote
Charlie Munger
If you can get good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift. View quote
Charlie Munger
Wall Street has too much wealth and political power. View quote
Charlie Munger
When someone takes their existing business and tries to transform it into something else - they fail. In technology that is often the case. Look at Kodak: it was the dominant imaging company in the world. They did fabulously during the great depression, but then wiped out the shareholders because of technological change. View quote
Charlie Munger
People are trying to be smart - all I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it's harder than most people think. View quote
Charlie Munger
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." View quote
Charlie Munger
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. View quote
Charlie Munger
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)
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. View quote
Charlie Munger