Charlie Munger

Our investment style has been given a name - focus investing - which implies ten holdings, not one hundred or four hundred. The idea that it is hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obvious idea. But 98% of the investment world does not think this way. It's been good for us.

Poor Charlie's Almanack, p. 100 (1st edition, 2005; 2nd edition, 2008), 2005

The hard part of the process for most people is the first $100,000. If you have a standing start at zero, getting together $100,000 is a long struggle for most people.

Afternoon Session - Berkshire Hathaway’s 1999 Meeting, 1999

The first $100,000 is a bitch, but you gotta do it. I don’t care what you have to do — if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn’t purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit.

Berkshire Hathaway’s 1998 (?) Annual General Meeting (AGM), 1998

... much of what is taught in modern corporate finance courses is twaddle.

1996 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, YouTube video with quote at 2:41:46 of 4:54:01 in video, 1996

We don't want to make our money selling things that are bad for people.

(quote at 4:32:01 of 5:42:25)

You fix what can be fixed, and what can't be fixed you endure.

(quote at 1:09:20 of 1:59:05)

You can't give the average Wall Street CEO really lenient standards of accounting and expect the figures to be good. The accountant is like the referee in soccer. The accountant has to be the adult that prevents the mayhem. Accountants don't want to be the adults because it causes liability, it causes responsibility, it causes difficulty ... they failed us terribly.

(quote at 23:30 of 1:59:58)

... I regard it as a cinch that a great nation will in due time be Rome. ... Where is Rome? Where is Britain in its heyday? They all pass and so our turn is bound to come some day.

(quote at 9:22 of 31:45)

Neither Warren nor I have ever used any fancy math in business — and neither did Ben Graham who taught Warren. Everything I have ever done in business could be done with the simplest algebra and geometry and addition and multiplication and so forth. I never used calculus for any practical work in my whole damn life — and I was a perfect whiz at it when they taught it to me.

(quote at 20:51 of 55:39)

Obviously, you have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double-entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention.And it's not that hard to understand.But you have to know enough about it to understand its limitations — because although accounting is the starting place, it's only a crude approximation. And it's not very hard to understand its limitations. For example, everyone can see that you have to more or less just guess at the useful life of a jet airplane or anything like that. Just because you express the depreciation rate in neat numbers doesn't make it anything you really know.

(p. 3 of 24)

What I would say is the single most important thing, if you want to avoid all the stupid errors, is knowing where you're competent and where you aren't. And that's very hard to do because the human mind naturally tries to make you think you're way smarter than you are.

(quote at 18:20 of 58:41)

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.