Charlie Munger Quotes

reality evoked by the Shavian character who said, “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.

tendencies, two of which are exceptionally prone to cause trouble: 1) incentive-caused bias, a natural cognitive drift toward the conclusion that what is good for the professional is good for the client and the wider civilization; and 2) man-with-a-hammer tendency, with the name taken from the proverb “To a man with only a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail.

Then, while people are justifying all these layers, it takes forever to get anything done. They’re too slow to make decisions, and nimbler people run circles around them.

Life and its various passages can be hard, brutally hard. The three things I have found helpful in coping with its challenges are: Have low expectations. Have a sense of humor. Surround yourself with the love of friends and family. Above all, live with change and adapt to it. If the world didn’t change, I’d still have a 12 handicap.

All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there

If you rise in life, you have to behave a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you're a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you're the bishop of Boston, you shouldn't go.

The great algorithm to remember in dealing with this tendency is simple: an idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it’s easily available to you.

Crowd folly, the tendency of humans, under some circumstances, to resemble lemmings, explains much foolish thinking of brilliant men and much foolish behavior.

Richard Feynman as follows: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you’re the easiest person to fool.

As he says, “We have three baskets for investing: yes, no, and too tough to understand.

Warren talks about these discounted cash flows. I’ve never seen him do one.

There’s another type of person I compare to an example from biology: When a bee finds nectar, it comes back and does a little dance that tells the rest of the hive, as a matter of genetic programming, which direction to go and how far. So about 40 or 50 years ago, some clever scientist stuck the nectar straight up. Well, the nectar’s never straight up in the ordinary life of a bee. The nectar’s out. So the bee finds the nectar and returns to the hive. But it doesn’t have the genetic programming to do a dance that says straight up. So what does it do? Well, if it were like Jack Welch, it would just sit there. But what it actually does is to dance this incoherent dance that gums things up. A lot of people are like that bee. They attempt to answer a question like that. And that is a huge mistake. Nobody expects you to know everything about everything. I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge. To me, they’re like the bee dancing its incoherent dance. They’re just screwing up the hive.

... 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.

To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of
undeserving people.

Never allow oneself to have an opinion on anything when you don't know the other side's arguments better than they do.