Top 25 Charlie Munger Quotes

I regard the bitcoin craze as totally asinine to create some manufactured currency.

Who would want one’s children growing up buying things like bitcoin? I hope to God my family doesn’t buy it. It’s noxious poison.

I’ve got some advice for the young: If you‘ve got anything you really want to do, don’t wait until you’re 93.

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.

I will say this: I know no wise person who doesn’t read a lot. I suspect that you can read on the computer now and get a lot of benefit out of it, but I doubt that it’ll work as well as reading print worked for me.

Wells Fargo had a glitch – the truth of the matter is they made a business judgement that was wrong. I don’t think anything is fundamentally wrong.

You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies.

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.

The perfect example of Darwinism is what technology has done to businesses.

Alternatives to gold and currency and to make a big speculative vehicle – I never considered for one second having anything to do with it. I detested it the minute it had been raised.

I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn’t understand both is a damned fool.

Economics profession, they’ve been – they’ve been confident in various formulas, but economics is not physics. The same formula that works in one decade doesn’t work in the next. Economics is a difficult subject.

A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.

I’m a great admirer of the Trump change of mind about China and making an ally out of China instead of screaming about their trade.

I love when I think we’re taking territory – if it makes sense in the long term, we just don’t give a damn what it looks like in the short term. After all, we’re running a cult, not a normal company.

There’s more honor in investment management than in investment banking.

That’s the last thing on Earth you should think about… There’s just a whole lot of things that aren’t going to work for you. Figure out what they are and avoid them like the plague. And one of them is bitcoin… It is total insanity.

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.

If you’re glued together right and honorable, you will succeed. Get in there and get rid of stupidities and avoid bad people. Try teaching that to your grandchildren. The best way is by example. Fix yourself.

Everyone has the idea of owning good companies. The problem is that they have high prices in relations to assets and earnings, and that takes all of the fun out of the game.

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.’

Gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but I think civilized people don’t buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.

They made a mistake. And it was an easy mistake to make. I don’t regard setting incentives aggressively as a mistake. I think the mistake was, when the bad news came, they didn’t recognize it directly. I don’t think that impairs the future of Wells Fargo. They’ll be better for it.

If any successes has come to me, it came because I insisted on thinking things through. That’s all I was capable of doing in life, was thinking pretty hard about trying to get the right answer, and then acting on it. I never learned to do anything else.

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.