Charlie Munger Quotes

Objective leaders identify their unproductive mental models and tweak them for greater effectiveness.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.

We all have mental models: the lens through which we see the world that drive our responses to everything we experience. Being aware of your mental models is key to being objective.

I think belief is like having the first Microsoft Windows - it's so rudimentary, in the human brainwork, it's so obviously a sham.

I'm bad at rationalisation - very bad.

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

I think the problem we have as apes is we're asking far bigger questions than we could possibly process.

You cannot question an assumption you do not know you have made.

The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don't even know you are making.

The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.

The old metaphysical prejudice that man 'always thinks' has not yet entirely disappeared. I am myself inclined to hold that man really thinks very little and very seldom.

We can only learn so much about our minds, because we are using our minds to do so.

Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know.

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

Intelligence is just a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.

Only two kinds of people can attain self-knowledge: those who are not encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realise that they know nothing.

Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.

The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.

All too often, when it comes to our own minds, we are surprisingly mindless. We sail on, blithely unaware of how much we are missing, of how little we grasp of our own thought process - and how much better we could be if only we'd taken the time to understand and to reflect.

Human intellect is incurably abstract.

Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening

How do I know that I know this, except that I've always been taught this and never heard anything else? [...] How sure am I of my own views? Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay, because you're in the safely moral majority.

The last thing that man will understand in nature is the performance of his brain.

Just as a physicist has to examine the telescope and galvanometer with which he is working; has to get a clear conception of what he can attain with them, and how they may deceive him; so, too, it seemed to me necessary to investigate likewise the capabilities of our power of thought.