Charlie Munger Quotes

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

We don’t like trading agony for money

Even if you assume that the whole economy would work better had we never had double taxation, having the envy and resentment of the richest paying low or no taxes screams of injustice. You have to have a fair system.

there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that’s still going to be lousy. The money still won’t come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.

The interesting thing is the field is so big – it’s enormous. One thing a modern civilization needs is energy.

I mean people are really crazy about minor decrements down. And then, if you act on them, then you get into reciprocation tendency, because you don’t just reciprocate affection, you reciprocate animosity, and the whole thing can escalate. And so huge insanities can come from just subconsciously over-weighing the importance of what you’re losing or almost getting and not getting.

If we’ve been a little more successful than other people, is because we always realised that the school of life was always open, and if you were not learning more you are falling behind.

In the corporate world, if you have analysts, due diligence, and no horse sense, you’ve just described hell.

Let me know what your problem is, and I will try to make it more difficult for you.

And maybe the cereal makers by and large have learned to be less crazy about fighting for market share-because if you get even one person who’s hell-bent on gaining market share…. For example, if I were Kellogg and I decided that I had to have 60% of the market, I think I could take most of the profit out of cereals. I’d ruin Kellogg in the process. But I think I could do it.

Since those don’t hit financial reports, the opportunities you had but didn’t accept, most people don’t bother thinking about them very much. At least that is a mistake we don’t make. We rub our own noses in our mistakes in blowing opportunities, as we just did.

Fixable but unfixed bad performance is bad character and tends to create more of itself, causing more damage to the excuse giver with each tolerated instance.