56 Quotes by William J. Bernstein

99% of fund managers demonstrate no evidence of skill whatsoever.

The typical fund company services 401k plan participants in the same way that Baby Face Nelson serviced banks.

The easiest way to get rich is to spend as little as possible.

As populations grow beyond Dunbar’s number, face-to-face contact no longer suffices to maintain political control. At this point, writing supplies the best mechanism for communicating among large numbers of people, and power naturally accrues to the literate. Consequently, societies with high rates of literacy, such as Athens, tend to have more smoothly running republics than those with low rates, such as the late Roman one.

In Battuta’s obsession with sharia and the Muslim world and in his lack of interest in nearly everything outside it we clearly see the double-edged sword of Islam so visible in today’s world: an ecumenical but self-satisfied faith capable of uniting far-flung peoples under one system of belief and one regime of law, but also severely limited in its capacity to examine and borrow from others.

The Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca is said to have owned five hundred tripod tables with ivory legs – no small irony, since he was a vocal critic of the empire’s extravagances.

Athens, while remaining nominally independent, no longer commanded its lifelines or its fate. Just as it had invented many Western institutions and intellectual and artistic endeavors, so did it pioneer a less glorious tradition. In the centuries following the Peloponnesian war, Athens became the first in a long line of senescent Western empires to suffer the ignominious transformation from world power to open-air theme park, famous only for its arts, its architecture, its schools, and its past.

For the taxable investor, indexing means never having to say you’re sorry.

Personal finance, like most important aspects of life, is a never-ending quest. The competent investor never stops learning.