Charlie Munger Quotes

Being general manager is like being the de facto owner. It's like wearing the crown of 'Restaurant Man' without being 'Restaurant Man.' You're trying to run the business, but you're running the ranch without riding the big horse.

I think that might have been an element in it, and people have asked me that very thing. Remember, Disney is the majority shareholder, but it is not an operating division of Disney.

I do not believe that the government is in any position to say exactly how every single business and every single activity shall reach those performances.

I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.

One thing I'm so grateful for is sidestepping the usual venture capital, private equity route. My friends who have gone that way are many times beholden to their boards of directors, to 'sell' ideas to a team.

I think overall it is better for businesses to stay private because you have more latitude, more freedom.

The private sector doesn't sit around and say - 'Well, since the president said we should do this, we should do it.'

What's great about my father is that, because we've been involved in the business from such a young age, he's given us - and we've earned - autonomy, and he's given us the rope to go out and grow the brand.

Running a business is not the same as being president of the United States.

I have learned to walk: ever since, I let myself run. I have learned to fly: ever since, I do not want to be pushed before moving along.

You get the idea. Every business, like a painting, operates according to its own rules. There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once. There are no rules. You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it's because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over. It's the greatest thrill in the world and it runs away screaming at the first sight of bullet points.

It's not that you have jobs on the Internet, but the Internet makes it possible for more people to build their own jobs. What it does is, it erodes the power of institutions. It used to be you needed an institution to have a job. But, if you look at the three of us on this show, I don't think any of us is really employed by an institution. We run our own lives.

When you grow a business, it belongs to a lot of other people besides you. As much as you want to control it, the minute you go public, it becomes a business . . .

It was [Donald trump] had seen me on the job there, doing other things, and he asked me if I could run the place, and so we had that conversation. But I appreciate that, too.

Don't help the young too much — it will just weaken them and they'll resent it, and finally start avoiding you.

Donald Trump says he wants to run America like he's running his business? God help us.

My only role in the opening of the schools has been to suggest and encourage opening them. But it is impossible for there to be a [central authority] controlling the schools. They are in more than 100 countries, and there must be many different companies that have opened and run them.

I recently assured Public Sector Banks they will have total autonomy in taking business decisions.

We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.

I don't want to wait for Hollywood to decide that what I do is good.

Whoever has not two-thirds of his time to himself, is a slave.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Luckily, what you trade off in not being part of the comic book canon and not having some literature that you can use to your benefit, in terms of figuring out who you are, you gain in the ability to just be whoever you want to be.

I still live my life the way that I want to live it, and people are very respectful of my space, but they also want to chat, and I quite like chatting.

I don't want to stop you. I want you to stop yourself.