Charlie Munger Quotes

which helps the objective person end up like the only player without a blindfold in a game of pin the tail on the donkey.

It is not always recognized that to unction best, morality should sometimes appear unfair, like most worldly outcomes. The craving for perfect fairness causes a lot of terrible problems in system function. Some systems should be made deliberately unfair to individuals because they'll be fairer on on average for all of us. Thus, there can be virtue in apparent non-fairness.

forth. And the other is to evaluate the psychological factors that cause subconscious conclusions, many of which are wrong.

"Why fret too much about what you can't fix? Just keep your head down & do your best."

Demosthenes noted, “What a man wishes, he will believe.” And

I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.

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 the world.

Two partners that I chose for one little phase of my life had the following rule: They created a little design/build construction team, and they sat down and said, two-man partnership, divide everything equally, here’s the rule; “Whenever we’re behind in our commitments to other people, we will both work 14 hours a day until we’re caught up.”

Well, needless to say, that firm didn’t fail. The people died rich. It’s such a simple idea.

It takes character to sit there with all that cash and do nothing. I didn't get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.

Eventually, his own work attracted wide attention, and he said of his work, “If I have seen a little farther than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” The bones of that man lie buried now, in Westminster Abbey, under an unusual inscription: “Here lie the remains of all that was mortal in Sir Isaac Newton.

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts.... Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day–if you live long enough–most people get what they deserve.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time — none, zero

Some of the worst dysfunctions in businesses come from the fact that they balkanize reality into little individual departments, with territoriality and turf protection and so forth. So if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries. You don’t have to know it all. Just take in the best big ideas from all these disciplines. And it’s not that hard to do.

The second idea that I developed very early is that there’s no love that’s so right as admiration-based love, and such love should include the instructive dead.

Yet, within this pursuit of rationality and simplicity, he is careful to avoid what he calls physics envy, the common human craving to reduce enormously complex systems (such as those in economics) to one-size-fits-all Newtonian formulas. Instead, he faithfully honors Albert Einstein’s admonition: “A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.