Charles Munger, Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway will host Wesco Financial Corp. (WSC) Annual Shareholders meeting on Wed, May 07, 2008 in Pasadena, California. Charlie is the Chairman, Chief Exec. Officer and President of Wesco, which is 80% owned by Berkshire Hathaway.

Charlie himself is very intelligent businessman and investor just as smart as Warren Buffett. Here are various Charlie Munger notable quotes:

"Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa."
- Charles Munger

"All intelligent investing is value investing - to acquire more than you are paying for. Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass."
- Charles Munger

"We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side."
- Charles Munger

"Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition."
- Charles Munger

"If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor."
- Charles Munger

"In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time - none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads - at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out."
- Charles Munger

"We both insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think. So Warren and I do more reading and thinking and less doing than most people in business. We do that because we like that kind of a life."
- Charles Munger

"You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality. If you don’t have the cast of mind, you’re destined for failure even if you have a high I.Q."
- Charles Munger

"You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention."
- Charles Munger

"If you have competence, you pretty much know its boundaries already. To ask the question (of whether you are past the boundary) is to answer it."
- Charles Munger

“Why don't I kill your mother and we'll split the insurance money?”
- Charles Munger  
 
“Those two guys are two of the smartest young men in the country, and it's much better to be copied by people that smart.”
- Charles Munger
 
“You have a real asset-price bubble in places like parts of California and the suburbs of Washington, D.C.”
- Charles Munger
 
“I know someone who lives next door to what you would actually call a fairly modest house that just sold for $17 million. There are some very extreme housing price bubbles going on .”
- Charles Munger
 
“The present era has no comparable referent in the past history of capitalism. We have a higher percentage of the intelligentsia engaged in buying and selling pieces of paper and promoting trading activity than in any past era. A lot of what I see now reminds me of Sodom and Gomorrah. You get activity feeding on itself, envy and imitation. It has happened in the past that there came bad consequences.”
- Charles Munger

“A great civilization will bear a lot of abuse, but there are dangers in the current situation that threaten anyone who swings for the fences.”
- Charles Munger
 
“We just throw some decisions into the 'too hard' file and go onto others.”
- Charles Munger
 
“I would rather throw a viper down my shirtfront than hire a compensation consultant.”
- Charles Munger
 
“It's worse than that. Those people who wanted to round pi to 3.2 were stupid. These people [the opponents of expensing options] are worse than stupid. They know it's wrong and want to do it anyway.”
- Charles Munger
 
“Warren gave a very optimistic prognosis. Some people seem to think there's no trouble just because it hasn't happened yet. If you jump out the window at the 42nd floor and you're still doing fine as you pass the 27th floor, that doesn't mean you don't have a serious problem. I would want to address the problem right now. They'd better face it. ”
- Charles Munger

"Price is what you pay, value is what you get"
- Charles Munger

"There are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers."
- Charles Munger
 
"People like the robber barons assumed that the doctrine of the survival of the fittest authenticated them as deserving power. You know, "I'm the richest. Therefore, I'm the best. God's in his heaven, etc." And that reaction of the robber barons was so irritating to people that it made it unfashionable to think of an economy as an ecosystem. But the truth is that it is a lot like an ecosystem. And you get many of the same results."
- Charles Munger

Other great quotes related to investing:

"Investors repeatedly jump ship on a good strategy just because it hasn't worked so well lately, and, almost invariably, abandon it at precisely the wrong time."
- David Dreman

"I've seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage - leverage being borrowed money. You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing."
- Warren Buffett

"If the job has been correctly done when a common stock is purchased, the time to sell it is almost never."
- Philip Fisher

"You are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you."
- Benjamin Graham
 
"Investing is simple, but not easy."
- Warren Buffet
 
"Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results."
- Warren Buffett

"The important thing is to keep playing, to play against weak opponents and to play for big stakes."
- Warren Buffett
 
"First, many in Wall Street - a community in which quality control is not prized - will sell investors anything they will buy."
- Warren Buffett
 
"A pack of lemmings looks like a group of rugged individualists compared with Wall Street when it gets a concept in its teeth."
- Warren Buffett
 
"I don't read economic forecasts. I don't read the funny papers."
- Warren Buffett

"Yes, risk-taking is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing taking."
- Tim McMahon
 
"The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything--you can wait for your pitch. The problem when you're a money manager is that your fans keep yelling, 'Swing, you bum!'"
- Warren Buffett
 
"Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. once you're above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing."
- Warren Buffett

"Based on my own personal experience - both as an investor in recent years and an expert witness in years past - rarely do more than three or four variables really count. Everything else is noise."
- Marty Whitman

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
- Albert Einstein
 
"Thousands of experts study overbought indicators, oversold indicators, head-and-shoulder patterns, put-call ratios, the Fed's policy on money supply, foreign investment, the movement of the constellations through the heavens, and the moss on oak trees, and they can't predict markets with any useful consistency, any more than the gizzard squeezers could tell the Roman emperors when the Huns would attack."
- Peter Lynch
 
"We attracted a lot of market timers and asset allocators. I don't need those ... amateurs in my fund."
- Martin Whitman

"In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine."
- Benjamin Graham
 
"I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful."
- Warren Buffett

"I have owned one stock since 1969, two since 1988 and one I started buying in 1986 or so. That's my portfolio. Six stocks. I once owned 17, but that was way too much"
- Philip Fisher

"The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing."
- Philip Fisher

"To me, it's obvious that the winner has to bet very selectively. It's been obvious to me since very early in life. I don't know why it's not obvious to very many other people."
- Charles Munger

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have."
- Thomas Jefferson
 
"In the financial world it tends to be misleading to state, "There is no free lunch." Rather the more meaningful comment is, "Somebody has to pay for lunch.""
- Martin Whitman
 
"Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years."
- Warren Buffett
 
"The intelligent investor is likely to need considerable will power to keep from following the crowd."
- Benjamin Graham

"Don't gamble. Take all your savings and buy a good stock, and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it."
- Will Rogers

"The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions."
- Benjamin Graham

"Get inside information from the president and you will probably lose half of your money. If you get it from the chairman of the board, you will lose all of it."
- Jim Rogers

"Any man who is a bear on the future of this country will go broke."
- J.P.Morgan
 
"There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate - when he can't afford it and when he can."
- Mark Twain

"Timidity prompted by past failures causes investors to miss the most important bull markets."
- Walter Schloss
 
"Unless you can watch your stock holdings decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market."
- Warren Buffett
 
"I'd be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were efficient "
- Warren Buffett

"Value stocks are about as exciting as watching grass grow. But have you ever noticed just how much your grass grows in a week?"
- Christopher Browne