Charlie Munger Quotes

Unfortunately, the more complex the system, the greater the room for error.

If the process of life is about moving toward increased complexity and organization, a sort of sublime unfolding of greater and greater self-organizing systems, then we're actually doing pretty well.

As we get more transparent with data sets about infrastructure and systems management, I have a feeling we'll see big changes in how we think about complexity and our relationship to our actions.

It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.

A lot of things can't be modeled very well.

The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.

Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.

In modern societies, all things, even in the military department of affairs, are decided, not by individual effort, but by the combined operations of numbers;

Correct" is a property of small systems.

The State machine breaks often down in consequence of mistakes made forty and fifty years ago …

Complex systems work until the day that they don’t work.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.

A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms.

I do not see any other way of realizing our hopes about World Organization in five or six days. Even the Almighty took seven.

Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

Cecil's dispatch of business was extraordinary, his maxim being, "The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once."

There is no name for all who participate in group decision-making or the organization which they form. I propose to call this organization the Technostructure.

After all this time, it seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out- but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.

I heard that a lot and I just sort of thought, the world was an even more interesting place than the people who were making the decisions were perhaps interpreting it to be.

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.

Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme.