Poor Charlie’s Almanack (Primary source)
In the tradition of Benjamin Franklin’s own almanack, Poor Charlie’s Almanack stands as a remarkable distillation of one man’s lifelong pursuit of what he termed elementary worldly wisdom. Compiled with evident devotion by Peter Kaufman and first published in 2005, this volume represents the most comprehensive gathering of Charles Munger’s speeches, insights, and philosophical observations spanning two decades of public discourse.
More about “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” →
“The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting, so that the big people don’t always win—is that as you get big, you get the bureaucracy. And with the bureaucracy comes the territoriality, which is again grounded in human nature. And the incentives are perverse. For example, if you worked for AT&T in my day, it was a great bureaucracy. Who in the hell was really thinking about the shareholder or anything else? And in a bureaucracy, you think the work is done when it goes out of your in-basket into somebody else’s in-basket. But, of course, it isn’t. It’s not done until AT&T delivers what it’s supposed to deliver. So you get big, fat, dumb, unmotivated bureaucracies.”
Charlie Munger
“If anything, I now believe even more strongly that reliability is essential for progress in life and while quantum mechanics is unlearnable for a vast majority, reliability can be learned to great advantage by almost anyone.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter) who didn’t read all the time—none, zero. You’d be amazed how much Warren reads—and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“Invert, always invert”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.”
— Charlie Munger Primary sourceMore quotes by Charlie Munger →
This case isn’t ripe yet. Until it is, our policy with Mr Big is “live and let live”.
Bond looked quizzically at Captain Dexter.
“In my job,” he said, “when I come up against a man like this one, I have another motto. It’s ‘live and let die’.”
“I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“Work could cure almost anything.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source