Charlie Munger Trying Quotations

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 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.

The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It's such a simple idea. It's the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.

We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.

I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don't have any real knowledge.

It's in the nature of stock markets to go way down from time to time. There's no system to avoid bad markets. You can't do it unless you try to time the market, which is a seriously dumb thing to do. Conservative investing with steady savings without expecting miracles is the way to go.

A lot of people think if you just had more process and more compliance -- checks and doublechecks and so forth -- you could create a better result in the world. Well, Berkshire has had practically no process. We had hardly any internal auditing until they forced it on us. We just try to operate in a seamless web of deserved trust and be careful whom we trust.

Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.

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

How do you compete against a true fanatic? You can only try to build the best possible moat and continuously attempt to widen it.

Every business tries to turn this year's success into next year's greater success. It's hard for me to see why Microsoft is sinful to do this. If it's a sin, then I hope all of Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiaries are sinners. Someone whose salary is paid by U.S.taxpayers is happy to dramatically weaken the one place where we're winning big?!

The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much.

To atone, I teach and try to set an example...I love spreading this stuff around. Just because it's trite doesn't mean it isn't right. In fact, I like to say, 'If it's trite, it's right.'

Trying to prioritize among things we're unlikely to do is pretty fruitless.

Financial institutions make us nervous when they're trying to do well.

Tthe first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.... You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life.