751 Quotes by Charlie Munger

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.

The general culture of investment banking has deteriorated over the years. We did a $6 million deal years ago for Diversified Retailing and we were rigorously and intelligently screened. They bankers cared and wanted to protect their clients. The culture now is that anything that can be sold for a profit will be. 'Can you sell it?' is the moral test, and that's not an adequate test.

Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.

Determine value apart from price; progress apart from activity; wealth apart from size.

The harder you work, the more confidence you get. But you may be working hard on something that is false.

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.

You'll better understand the evil when top audit firms started selling fraudulent tax shelters when I tell you that one told me that they're better [than the others] because they only sold [the schemes] to their top-20 clients, so no-one would notice.

The tradition of always looking for the answer in the most fundamental way available - that is a great tradition, and it saves a lot of time in this world.

The hedge fund known as "Long Term Capital Management" collapsed last fall through overconfidence in its highly leveraged methods, despite I.Q.'s of its principals that must have averaged 160. Smart people aren't exempt from professional disasters from overconfidence. Often, they just run aground in the more difficult voyages they choose, relying on their self-appraisals that they have superior talents and methods.