Jim Rogers > Quotes

“Those who can not adjust to change will be swept aside by it. Those who recognize change and react accordingly will benefit.”
― Jim Rogers, A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing

“Acknowledge the complexity of the world and resist the impression that you easily understand it. People are too quick to accept conventional wisdom, because it sounds basically true and it tends to be reinforced by both their peers and opinion leaders, many of whome have never looked at whether the facts support the received wisdom. It's a basic fact of life that many things "everybody knows" turn out to be wrong.”
― Jim Rogers

“Never act upon wishful thinking. Act without checking the facts, and chances are that you will be swept away along with the mob.”
― Jim Rogers, A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing

“If anybody laughs at your idea, view it as a sign of potential success!”
― Jim Rogers, A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing

“Not one country in existence today has had the same borders and government for as long as two hundred years. The world will continue changing.”
― Jim Rogers, A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing

“Beware of all politicians everywhere. They excelled at recess when they were in school but have excelled at little since.”
― Jim Rogers, A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing

“If everyone saw himself as a citizen of the world rather than of his town, city or country, the world would be a more peaceful, better place where success in all forms is abundant and available to all.”
― Jim Rogers, A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing

“Nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I've made a lot of money. Wandering away from the action is the way to find the new action.”
― Jim Rogers

“There is nothing better than having to struggle and make your own way.”
― Jim Rogers, Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets

“The Roman censor Appius Claudius the Blind said, “Every man is the architect of his own fortune.”
― Jim Rogers, Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets

“We wanted to take Polaroids of her and all the kids, about eight of them, of all ages, several photos, so we could give some to the family. She grabbed her youngest and asked us to wait. And then like any mother, anywhere in the world—do not let anyone tell you that people are fundamentally different—she combed the child’s hair and changed his shirt before letting him pose for the pictures. The second shirt was slightly less dirty than the first. She wanted him to look his best. That mother could have been in Greenwich, Connecticut, as easily as on the steppes of Mongolia.”
― Jim Rogers, Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip

“Do not worry about failure, I would tell them. Do not worry about making mistakes in life. It is good to lose money, to go broke at least once, and preferably twice. But if you are going to do it, do it early in your career. It is better to go bust when you are talking about $20,000 than when you are talking about $20 million. Do it early, and it is not the end of the world.”
― Jim Rogers, Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets

“When a country’s economy is in trouble—when it has a balance of trade deficit, for instance, and when its debts are mounting—and when the currency, therefore, is declining in value because everybody can see that the economy is bad, politicians, throughout history, have found a way of making things worse with the imposition of exchange controls. They run to the press and they say, “Listen, all you God-fearing Americans, Germans, Russians, whatever you are, we have a temporary problem in the financial market and it is caused by these evil speculators who are driving down the value of our currency—there is nothing wrong with our currency, we are a strong country with a sound economy, and if it were not for these speculators everything would be OK.” Diverting attention away from the real cause of the problem, which is their own mismanagement of the economy, politicians look to three crowds of people to blame for the regrettable situation. After the speculators come bankers and foreigners. Nobody likes bankers anyway, not even in good times; in bad times, everybody likes them less, because everybody sees them as rich and growing richer off the bad turn of events. Foreigners as a target are equally safe, because foreigners cannot vote. They do not have a say-so in national affairs, and remember, their food smells bad. Politicians will even blame journalists: if reporters did not write about our tanking economy, our economy would not be tanking. So we are going to enact this temporary measure, they say. To stem the scourge of a declining currency, we are going to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for people to take their money out of the country—it will not affect most of you because you do not travel or otherwise spend cash overseas. (See Chapter 9 and the Bernanke delusion.) Then they introduce serious exchange controls. They are always “temporary,” yet they always go on for years and years. Like anything else spawned by the government, once they are in place, a bureaucracy grows up around them. A constituency now arises whose sole purpose is to defend exchange controls and thereby assure their longevity. And they are always disastrous for a country. The free flow of capital stops. Money is trapped inside your country. And the country stops being as competitive as it once was.”
― Jim Rogers, Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets

“Botswana was rich in diamonds, Ghana in cocoa and gold, Morocco in phosphates. There were many countries I was eager to visit and revisit, such as Zambia, with its emeralds and copper, and Cameroon, awash in oil. I could not wait to visit”
― Jim Rogers, Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip

“This is the legacy of China’s one-child policy, instituted in 1980 (and just officially ended in 2002). Studies have shown that only children and firstborns are usually smarter, more driven, and more accomplished than other children. And, of course, they are more often spoiled. In China one finds an entire country of only children. Everybody’s child is special, smarter, more driven, and more accomplished—or”
― Jim Rogers, Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip

“I have learned that when you've done your homework, once you recognize that supply and demand are totally out of whack, and you make your move, you are definitely going to get very lucky.”
― Jim Rogers, Hot Commodities: How Anyone Can Invest Profitably in the World's Best Market

“According to the media and other stock market "experts," the equities bull is forever hiding just around that next corner on Wall Street. But millions of investors who listened to the experts back in 1998-2001 about "the New Economy" get hammered in the stock market and are still trying to get back to even.

The smart investor looks for opportunities to acquire value on the cheap, with one eye out for a dynamic change in the offing that might make that investment even more valuable.”
― Jim Rogers, Hot Commodities: How Anyone Can Invest Profitably in the World's Best Market

“money is the lance, not the grail”
― Jim Rogers, Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets

“Whenever I see everyone rushing to bet their money on what’s hot, I remind myself of Bernard Baruch, the Wall Street legend and adviser to U.S. presidents. During the stock-market craze of the late 1920s, Baruch stopped for a shoeshine one day and the guy working on his shoes began giving him stock tips. His shoes looking fine, Baruch headed back to the office—and sold everything. I had my own Bernard Baruch moment in mid-1998 as most people were transfixed by the astonishing and continued rise of a group of glamour tech stocks.”
― Jim Rogers, Hot Commodities: How Anyone Can Invest Profitably in the World's Best Market

“But there's a world of difference between knowing a type and knowing a person. When you've traveled all over the planet, as I have, and communicate with people from other cultures, you come to understand that, ultimately, very few human beings conform to the stereotypes imposed upon them. And, for the most part, we all want the same things out of life.”
― Jim Rogers, A Gift to My Children: A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing

“Bottoms in the investment world don't end with four-year lows; they end with 10- or 15-year lows.”
― Jim Rogers

“Years later, a Columbia business school dean, citing a university study, told me that the single most important predictor of a happy life in adulthood was having a paying job as a teenager. All”
― Jim Rogers, Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets

“Morocco, one of the more fully developed countries in Africa, with a solid infrastructure and a population of about 27 million, holds roughly two thirds of the world’s reserves of phosphate rock—phosphate deposits are to Morocco as oil is to Venezuela—and dominates the world market in this vital”
― Jim Rogers, Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip