Charlie Munger Quotes

An army is a diversion of energy from the productive life of a nation.

I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money.

It's better to waste money than time. You can always get more money.

Wars are made to make debt.

In economics, one of the most important concepts is 'opportunity cost' - the idea that once you spend your money on something, you can't spend it again on something else.

Time is money says the proverb, but turn it around and you get a precious truth. Money is time.

Textbooks describe economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. That definition may be the 'what,' but it certainly is not the 'why.'

It will be sufficient to point to the enormous burdens which armaments place on the economic, social, and intellectual resources of a nation, as well as on its budget and taxes.

To spend more money, you have to have more money, but time is fixed and we all have the same amount to spare. How we choose to spend it can make a significant difference on the impact we have in our careers or in the world.

What concerns you and me is simply who is putting the money in, who is getting it out, and what good it does

The dictates of economics, that "dismal science," limit the benefits of medical science

I think very few people still understand the distinction between CEOs on Wall Street and the hedge-fund billionaires operating separately.

There's no other industry in the world where you could spend $100m as frivolously as they do in the film industry. Think about how much good you could do with $100m... it can be spent in 20 minutes on a movie.

I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you're trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you're giving it away. I mean is it gonna erode your ability, you know, to make money? Are you gonna somehow get confused about what you're trying to do?

Making products for $17 an hour that we could have purchased for 75 cents an hour wastes resources that we could have used elsewhere.

My impression of Wall Street growing up was certainly that it was like the big, bad place where all of the men did the bad things with our money.

It's natural that you'd have more brains going into money management. There are so many huge incomes in money management and investment banking - it's like ants to sugar. There are huge incentives for a man to take up money management as opposed to, say, physics, and it's a lot easier.

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

As a rich country, we can, in some sense, "afford" the war. But spending money on the war means that we are not spending money on other things that we could have spent the money on.

Economy is the thief of time.

In order that one industry might grow or come into existence, a hundred other industries would have to shrink.

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves."

Why spend 18 hours watching someone else's war, when you know how it comes out? We win, and then have to buy all their cars.

Whatever capital you divert to the support of a shiftless and good-for-nothing person is so much diverted from some other employment, and that means from somebody else. I would spend any conceivable amount of zeal and eloquence if I possessed it to try to make people grasp this idea. Capital is force. If it goes one way it cannot go another. If you give a loaf to a pauper you cannot give the same loaf to a laborer. Now this other man who would have got it but for the charitable sentiment which bestowed it on a worthless member of society is the Forgotten Man.