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All Quotes by author - Charlie Munger

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'm proud to be associated with the value system at Berkshire Hathaway; I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad. "

" I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right. "

" It's a real pleasure to earn the trust of your customers slowly over time by doing what's right. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Most people don't grab the right ideas or don't know what to do with them. "

" 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. "

" The 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. "

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

" 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.' "

" There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking. "

" 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. "

" Wall Street has too much wealth and political power. "

" 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. "

" When someone takes their existing business and tries to transform it into something else - they fail. In technology that is often the case. Look at Kodak: it was the dominant imaging company in the world. They did fabulously during the great depression, but then wiped out the shareholders because of technological change. "

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

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