Charlie Munger Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group then to hell with them.

  Charlie Munger

  Giving, Littles, Groups

• In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don't give a damn about safety. They let it balloon and balloon and balloon. It's aided by false accounting.

  Charlie Munger

  Engineering, People, Safety

• ...People need to ask, "How do I play the hand that has been dealt me?" The world is not going to give you extra return just because you want it. You have to be very shrewd and hard working to get a little extra. It's so much easier to reduce your wants. There are a lot of smart people and a lot of them cheat, so it's not easy to win.

  Charlie Munger

  Smart, Hard Work, Winning

• As I talk about strengths and weaknesses in academic economics, one interesting fact you are entitled to know is that I never took a course in economics. And with this striking lack of credentials, you may wonder why I have the chutzpah to be up here giving this talk. The answer is I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it.

  Charlie Munger

  Interesting, Giving, Black

• Those of us who have been very fortunate have a duty to give back. Whether one gives a lot as one goes along as I do or a little and then a lot [when one dies] as Warrendoes is a matter of personal preference. I would hate to have people ask me for money all day long.

  Charlie Munger

  Hate, Long, People

  Charlie Munger's advice on life and other at the 2003 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, www.tilsonfunds.com. May 3, 2003.

• there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.

  Charlie Munger

  Opportunity, Giving, Investing

• It's very useful to have a good grasp of all the big ideas in hard and soft science. A, it gives perspective. B, it gives a way for you to organize and file away experience in your head, so to speak.

  Charlie Munger

  Ideas, Giving, Perspective

• They [Mc Donalds] take people and give them a first job, which enables them to get a second job. They do a very good job of educating troubled young people to be good citizens and they're probably more successful than charter schools.

  Charlie Munger

  Jobs, School, Successful

• Size will hurt returns. Look at Berkshire Hathaway - the last five things Warren has done have generated returns that are splendid by historical standards, but now give him $100 billion in assets and measure outcomes across all of it, it doesn't look so good. We can only buy big positions, and the only time we can get big positions is during a horrible period of decline or stasis. That really doesn't happen very often.

  Charlie Munger

  Hurt, Giving, Historical

  Charlie Munger's opening remarks at the 2005 Wesco Financial Annual Meeting, www.tilsonfunds.com. May 4, 2005.

• I think the notion...that liquidity is this - of tradable common stock - is a great contributor to capitalism - I think that is mostly twaddle... The liquidity gives us these crazy booms, which have many problems as well as virtues.

  Charlie Munger

  Crazy, Thinking, Giving

  BRK Annual Meeting, Afternoon Session, buffett.cnbc.com. May 1, 2004.

• The tax code gives you an enormous advantage if you can find some things you can just sit with.

  Charlie Munger

  Giving, Advantage, Enormous

• I talked to one accountant, a very nice fellow who I would have been glad to have his family marry into mine. He said, "What these other accounting firms have done is very unethical. The [tax avoidance scheme] works best if it's not found out [by the IRS], so we only give it to our best clients, not the rest, so it's unlikely to be discovered. So my firm is better than the others." [Laughter] I'm not kidding. And he was a perfectly nice man. People just follow the crowd...Their mind just drifts off in a ghastly way.

  Charlie Munger

  Laughter, Nice, Men

• I don't have too much interest in teaching other people how to get rich. And that isn't because I fear the competition or anything like that - Warrenhas always been very open about what he's learned, and I share that ethos. My personal behavior model is Lord Keynes: I wanted to get rich so I could be independent, and so I could do other things like give talks on the intersection of psychology and economics. I didn't want to turn it into a total obsession.

  Charlie Munger

  Teaching, Independent, Ethos

  Charlie Munger's speech on the psychology of human misjudgment at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 1995.

• I get flack for saying [when I visit a college and give a speech], "This is a nice college, but the really great educator is McDonald's." They hate me for saying this and think I'm a slimy creature. But McDonald's hires people with bad work habits, trains them, and teaches them to come to work on time and have good work habits. I think a lot of what goes on there is better than at Harvard.

  Charlie Munger

  Nice, Hate, College

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