Charlie Munger Quotes

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

If I spend all of my day in the details as a CEO of a company like Wal-Mart, I think it would be trouble, because I wouldn't really be prepared to speak to the big issues that the country or the world should face.

Short-term thinking is the greatest enemy of good government.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

There is only one conflict, and that’s between short-term and long-term thinking.

Politicians have the same occupational hazard as generals—focusing on the last battle and overreacting to that.

Humans have a tendency towards short-term thinking.

If individuals have no sufficient reason to believe that a good situation today will have adverse long-term consequences, it must always be rational for them to aim to maximize their short-term good.

I understand that fans think short-term, and there's nothing wrong with that. You live or you die in the short term. But I believe in our system, and when you do that, you don't make knee-jerk decisions.

It's impossible for us to forecast what's going to happen ten years from now and make a decision today to say what we're going to do.

Prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past.

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 task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.

You don't need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.

But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.

By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him.

By the needle you shall draw the thread, and by that which is past, see how that which is to come will be drawne on.

The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.

Data is great, but strategy is better

Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense

Whilst large organisations need foresight, they are also notorious in their bias for short term thinking, sometimes rejecting or even suppressing foresight.

Decisions are made by people who have time, not people who have talent.

People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.

if you wish to train yourself for higher executive positions, the first thing for you to decide is what you are training for. Ability to dominate or manipulate others? That ought to be easy enough, since most of the magazines advertise sure ways of developing something they call 'personality.' But I am convinced that the first essential of business success is the capacity for organized thinking.