Top 20 Charlie Munger Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is one thing to think gold has some marvelous store of value because man has no way of inventing more gold or getting it very easily, so it has the advantage of rarity. Believe me, man is capable of somehow creating more bitcoin… They tell you there are rules and they can’t do it. Don’t believe them.

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.

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.

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.

If you can get really good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.

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

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

If you’re unhappy with what you’ve had over the last 50 years, you have an unfortunate misappraisal of life. It’s as good as it gets, and it’s very likely to get worse.

If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change.

I believe Costco does more for civilization than the Rockefeller Foundation. I think it’s a better place. You get a bunch of very intelligent people sitting around trying to do good, I immediately get kind of suspicious and squirm in my seat.

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.

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.

Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading.

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.

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.