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William J. Bernstein QUOTES

William J. Bernstein QUOTES

1 " It’s human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation. "

― William J. Bernstein

2 " P. J. O’Rourke: “North Korea has a 99% literacy rate, a disciplined, hardworking society, and a $900 per capita GDP. Morocco has a 43.7% literacy rate, a society that spends all day drinking coffee and pestering tourists to buy rugs, and a $3,260 per capita GDP.”1 "

― William J. Bernstein , The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created

3 " Although the Romans knew Chinese silk, they knew not China. They believed that silk grew directly on the mulberry tree, not realizing that the leaves were merely the worm's home and its food. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

4 " The Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca is said to have owned five hundred tripod tables with ivory legs—no small irony, since he was a vocal critic of the empire's extravagances. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

5 " Although the modern image of the imperial city is dominated by the ruins of the Coliseum and the Forum, the economic life of ancient Rome centered on side streets filled with apartments, shops, and horrea. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

6 " Athens, while remaining nominally independent, no longer commanded its lifelines or its fate. Just as it had invented many Western institutions and intellectual and artistic endeavors, so did it pioneer a less glorious tradition. In the centuries following the Peloponnesian war, Athens became the first in a long line of senescent Western empires to suffer the ignominious transformation from world power to open-air theme park, famous only for its arts, its architecture, its schools, and its past. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

7 " As a general rule, the Chinese seldom ventured west of Sri Lanka, the Indians north of the Red Sea mouth, and the Italians south of Alexandria. It was left to the Greeks, who ranged freely from India to Italy, to carry the greatest share of the traffic. "

― William J. Bernstein

8 " What investment banking is to the ambitious and acquisitive today, the pepper trade was to the Romans—the most direct route to great riches. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

9 " The ancient incense trade was thus no different from the modern cocaine and heroin trades: relatively safe around the raw agricultural source, but highly risky around the finished product and its ultimate consumers. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

10 " The incense trade catalyzed the birth of Islam, whose military, spiritual, and commercial impacts transformed medieval Asia, Europe, and Africa. Riding on a rising tide of global trade along the land and sea routes of Asia, Islam came to dominate that continent's spiritual as well as its commercial life. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

11 " Great intelligence and good luck are not required. The essential characteristics of the successful investor are the discipline and stamina to, in the words of John Bogle, “stay the course.”
Investing is not a destination. It is an ongoing journey through its four continents—theory, history, psychology, and business. "

― William J. Bernstein , The Four Pillars of Investing

12 " Western notions of individual autonomy and rule of law simply do not apply in the desert. An attack on one tribesman is an attack on all, and in a landscape where a murderer can quickly and quietly slip away, it matters little whether the accused is guilty or innocent. His entire clan is held accountable for thar—retribution. The resulting skein of honor and revenge, so familiar in the modern Middle East, is eternal, seemingly without beginning and without end. When the first recourse of victims is to their cousins, and not to the police or to an independent judicial system, poverty and political instability are the usual outcomes. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

13 " By the fourth millennium BC, the Fertile Crescent was not the only region of coalesced communities; organized agricultural, military, religious, and administrative activity had also begun to appear in the Indus Valley, in what is now Pakistan. Even before written records, there is evidence of trade between these two regions. Archaeologists have discovered lamps and cups in Mesopotamia dating from the late fourth millennium BC and made from conch shells found only in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

14 " When Vasco da Gama breached the Indian Ocean, the playing field had just been vacated by the one force capable of repelling him. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

15 " The reason that 'guru' is such a popular word is because 'charlatan' is so hard to spell. "

― William J. Bernstein , The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between

16 " Would you believe me if I told you that there’s an investment strategy that a seven-year-old could understand, will take you fifteen minutes of work per year, outperform 90 percent of finance professionals in the long run, and make you a millionaire over time?   Well, it is true, and here it is: Start by saving 15 percent of your salary at age 25 into a 401(k) plan, an IRA, or a taxable account (or all three). Put equal amounts of that 15 percent into just three different mutual funds:   A U.S. total stock market index fund An international total stock market index fund A U.S. total bond market index fund.   Over time, the three funds will grow at different rates, so once per year you’ll adjust their amounts so that they’re again equal. (That’s the fifteen minutes per year, assuming you’ve enrolled in an automatic savings plan.)   That’s it; if you can follow this simple recipe throughout your working career, you will almost certainly beat out most professional investors. More importantly, you’ll likely accumulate enough savings to retire comfortably. "

― William J. Bernstein , If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly

17 " In Battuta's obsession with sharia and the Muslim world and in his lack of interest in nearly everything outside it we clearly see the double-edged sword of Islam so visible in today's world: an ecumenical but self-satisfied faith capable of uniting far-flung peoples under one system of belief and one regime of law, but also severely limited in its capacity to examine and borrow from others. "

― William J. Bernstein , A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today

18 " If you find yourself stimulated in any way by your portfolio performance, then you are probably doing something very wrong. A superior portfolio strategy should be intrinsically boring. "

― William J. Bernstein , The Four Pillars of Investing

19 " George Bernard Shaw’s famous spelling of “fish” as “ghoti”—the first two letters pronounced as the last two in “tough,” the middle letter as in “women,” and the last two as in “nation. "

― William J. Bernstein , Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History from the Alphabet to the Internet

20 " The easiest way to get rich is to spend as little as possible. "

― William J. Bernstein , The Four Pillars of Investing