Charlie Munger Past Quotations

A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind, loving diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

It's stupid the way people extrapolate the past -- and not slightly stupid, but massively stupid.

It's a rare business that doesn't have a way worse future than it has a past.

I don't spend much time regretting the past, once I've taken my lesson from it. I don't dwell on it.

If you have competence, you pretty much know its boundaries already. To ask the question (of whether you are past the boundary) is to answer it.

Berkshire's past record has been almost ridiculous. If Berkshirehad used even half the leverage of, say, Rupert Murdoch, it would be five times its current size.

It's simplicity itself that its future will be way worse than its past.

To some extent, stocks are like Rembrandts. They sell based on what they've sold in the past. Bonds are much more rational. No-one thinks a bond's value will soar to the moon.

It's human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it's terrible that managements go along with this.

We have a higher percentage of the intelligentsia engaged in buying and selling pieces of paper and promoting trading activity than in any past era. A lot of what I see now reminds me of Sodomand Gomorrah. You get activity feeding on itself, envy and imitation. It has happened in the past that there came bad consequences.

Economic systems work better when there's an extreme reliability ethos. And the traditional way to get a reliability ethos, at least in past generations in America, was through religion. The religions instilled guilt. ... And this guilt, derived from religion, has been a huge driver of a reliability ethos, which has been very helpful to economic outcomes for man.