Why do smart investors make the same mistakes after generation? Because financial instincts such as fear, envy, and overconfidence are ancient, stubborn and grossly inappropriate for modern markets. Luckily, financial history leaves a trace of wisdom, wit, and hard-working lessons. Sometimes, one quote can do more to fix a worse habit than a 100 chart.
That’s what brought us together. On March 19th, 2025, I met Rachel Cropefer. That was right after my keynote speech Second Annual Institute for Advanced Investment Management (IAIM) Meeting At the University of Utah. My talk highlighted how investors can use financial history to gain a deeper understanding of current financial events and a clearer vision of the future. I closed with some quotes from the past. This is a concise and lasting truth that participants hoped could be used to make better decisions.
Later, former journalist and fellow financial history enthusiast Rachel proposed expanding the list. We sifted through hundreds of quotes. Some are serious, some are funny, but they all come from people who have overcome the economic highs and lows of the past 200 years.
As a result, a curation set of 30 quotes is dedicated Entertainment investor Grouped by Villain To avoid, virtue To adopt, and a little humor To keep yourself sanity through it. We chose timeless quotes designed to resonate for generations. It reminds you that regardless of your career, whether you’re not used to investing or that history still has something to teach you.
Villain
The most tragic mistakes in finance are those we could avoid – if we only learned from the past. However, these errors persist as our instincts, once essential to survival, often backfire in the market. Until evolution catches up, our best treatment is historical awareness. The following quote highlights some of the most harmful investors’ evils. To entrust them to memory helps to resist these patterns and frees up the spiritual abilities needed to cultivate more productive virtues.
envy
“Nothing undermines your financial judgment than the sight of your neighbor getting rich.”
–J. Pierpont Morgan, financial contractor
impatience
“Demonism lies in the concept of time. The great stock market bulls are trying to condense their future in a few days to discount the long march of history and capture the value of all future wealth. [their] Severe demands on everything now – owning the future with money now – that cannot even be tolerated by the concept of the future. ”
– James Buchan, author Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money
Injustice
“Drick-dependent business models are destined to fail.”
– Charlie Munger, late vice-president of Berkshire Hathaway
Hubris
“The weakness of human nature prevents men from being judges of good worthy of themselves.”
–Louis Brandeis, Author of Other people’s money
Overconfident
“When the speculator wins, he won’t stop until he loses.”
– George H. Lorimer, 19th century merchant
Self-satisfaction
“Always remember where someone is making products that make your product outdated.”
– Georges of Doriot, founder of Venture Capital’s father
rejection
“In the face of choices to change your mind and prove that you don’t have to do so, almost everyone is busy with evidence.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith, Financial Historian
over thinking
It’s amazing how many long-term benefits people like us have achieved by trying to do things that are consistently not stupid rather than trying to be very smart. ”
– Charlie Munger, late vice-president of Berkshire Hathaway
Herd’s behavior
“If the majority of players adopt the opposite position they have so far, the view of the minority becomes a widely held perspective.”
– David Swensen, late CIO of Yale University Fund
Blind faith
“The investment public is captivated and captured by the great financial mind. Its appeal stems from the scale of financial operations and the sense that when a lot of money is involved, the mental resources behind them will not be reduced.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith, Financial Historian
virtue
Eliminating harmful instincts is just the beginning. The next step is to fill that space with virtue. This is a much more difficult task. Evil is common and instinctive. Virtue is behavioral abnormality. The most powerful virtues are rare, easy to dismiss, and even more easy to forget. The next ten quotes come from the heart of finance that has successfully navigated some of the most ruthless markets in US history. Leave them to memory is a powerful next step to becoming a more skilled investor.
passion
“All the geniuses I live in this: When I hold my hand, I study it deeply. Day and night, it is before me. My heart permeates it. And the effort I have made is that people are happy to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.”
– Alexander Hamilton, first US Secretary of the Treasury
rif approx.
“I smoke four-cent cigars. I like them. If I smoke better, I might lose the taste for cheap ones I think are now pretty satisfying.”
– Edward Robinson, the father of Wall Street Queen Hetty Green
Self-discipline
“A lot of fluctuations should be made before decades have passed and you master the simplest and most important of all the rules of material welfare. The most wonderful financial strategy consists of living well within your own means.”
—Benjamin Graham, founder of the Value Investment Philosophy
ability
“The little people who know what they’re doing can do more than a big group of people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
– Robert Noyce, founder of Intel Corporation
Historical perception
“Unless you understand what happened before, you really can’t understand what’s going on right now.”
– Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer
education
“Adequate education is one of the long practices in augmenting high cognition so that it is strong enough to destroy the wrong thinking maintained by resistance to change.”
– Charlie Munger, late vice-president of Berkshire Hathaway
Humility
“There is a careful maxim about economic forecast trading, but it is too often ignored. You choose numbers, dates, and never choose both.”
—Paul A. Volcker, late Chairman of the Federal Reserve
Note
“In business, don’t close the bargain until you look back at it overnight.”
– Hetty Green, Queen of Wall Street
perspective
“A calm and modest life brings more happiness than a pursuit of success and constant restlessness.”
– Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein
Self-awareness
“There’s one management skill you need to start a company and another set of things you need to manage a larger company. They rarely reside in the same person.”
– Don Valentine, founder of Sequoia Capital
humor
Finance and investment are generally not related to humor, but when human evil is stretching to their limits, they often create outrageous situations that they don’t laugh. The following set of quotes comes from witnesses to some of the more crazy moments in US financial history. I hope you can find humor in the midst of madness.
“I’m trying to invest in such a great business that idiots can run them because sooner or later they’ll do that.”
– Warren Buffett, Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
“In the history of all the great catastrophes, you burn some brilliantly stupid fires on oiled rags.”
– Edwin Lefeve, financial journalist
“An era of speculative frenzy always draws both villains and suckers to Wall Street. This is how a three-alarm fire attracts onlookers and pickpockets.”
– Robert Sobel, Financial Historian
“I’m a lot of enemies. I say the devil will be afraid of me, like many of his satellites do here.”
– Hetty Green, Queen of Wall Street
“It was a ridiculous indication of the era when ‘enhanced leverage’ became a selling point for investment vehicles instead of warnings. It was like naming a new car model after a bad brake. ”
– Timothy Geithner, former Secretary of Treasury
“When they discovered the nature of the trickery, their wrath was, as imagined, obliged to assert themselves in a highly emphatic way, in which they had not bound but fruitful. [Jacob] He rarely visited Boston, and he would inevitably split the company with his ears. ”
– William Armstrong, Reformed Stock Gambler (1848)
“If there’s money in that place [the Knickerbocker Trust]please put it out first tomorrow. The man at that bank looks too good. You mark my words. ”
– Hetty Green, Queen of Wall Street
“Men have been scamned by other men many times. The fall of 1929 was probably the first opportunity for men to have a massive success.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith, Financial Historian
“A general rule of thumb is that the more complex the Wall Street creation, the faster and more investors should be running.”
– David Swensen, late CIO of Yale Investment Office
“The most common exit strategy was that we lost all our money.”
– Jack Melcher, venture capitalist
Close thoughts
The 235-year history of US funding is full of villains, schemes and epic mistakes. So, to ask, it’s fair: how can you be confident in such a system? The answer is that the history of finance is also rich in heroism, ingenuity, selflessness, the power of steadily progressing. The forward path is by no means linear, but over time the system works better than the alternative.
So it is essential to bridge the generational gap in the investment industry and make profits from past hard-earned lessons. So is the financial system of more historically informed self-awareness, where knowledge is compounded.
Like many of the insights shared here, this is not new. In 1940, Fred Schwed Jr. wrote Where is the customer’s yacht?a classic that skewered Wall Street with unparalleled humor and reached the same conclusion as us. Capitalism has its flaws, but it works. So we have Schwed Jr. have his final words. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t say it better.
“After seeing the performance of young rivals with temperament, I have a creepy attachment to that miserable old hug, a capitalist system, the capitalist system. We think it’s better to keep our financial machinery even with much of the nonsense we still grow up to. So far, the way to win millions of people has been exposed from time to time for good and bad companies, a system similar to Wall Street’s illicit mechanisms by bashing citizens with the broad side of the sabre, but this result has not always been satisfied.).
I’m probably willing to submit the idea that they’re thinking about themselves to the SEC. They are in the position of a doctor with only one patient and are unlikely to have another patient. Killing this patient is a tactical mistake, despite the praiseworthy scientific enthusiasm that encouraged him to try out the entire shelf of his pharmacopeia. After all, in this case there is no real risk that the patient has been cured. ”
–Fred Schwed Jr. ,author Where is the customer’s yacht?
