Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like people admitting they were complete stupid horses' asses. I know I'll perform better if I rub my nose in my mistakes. This is a wonderful trick to learn.
Darwin paid particular attention to disconfirming evidence. Objectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you're going to be a great thinker.
If all you succeed in doing in life is getting rich by buying little pieces of paper, it's a failed life. Life is more than being shrewd in wealth accumulation.
I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues - they may know a lot of French however.
Even in pure mathematics they can't remove all paradox, and the rest of us should also recognize we are going to have to endure a lot of paradox, like it or not.
Berkshire's past record has been almost ridiculous. If Berkshirehad used even half the leverage of, say, Rupert Murdoch, it would be five times its current size.
We're emphasizing the knowable by predicting how certain people and companies will swim against the current. We're not predicting the fluctuation in the current.
The definition of hell in the legal system is: endless due process and no justice; (in the corporate world) it would be: endless due diligence and no horse sense.
A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: "You don't seem smart enough to be so good at what you're doing. Do you have an explanation?"
It took us months of buying all the Coke stock we could to accumulate $1 billion worth - equal to 7% of the company. It's very hard to accumulate major positions.
The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It's like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.
Common stock investors can make money by predicting the outcomes of practice evolution. You can't derive this by fundamental analysis - you must think biologically.
Spend less than you make; always be saving something. Put it into a tax-deferred account. Over time, it will begin to amount to something. This is such a no-brainer.
The idea of excessive diversification is madness. Wide diversification, which necessarily includes investment in mediocre businesses, only guarantees ordinary results.
If you're unhappy with what you've had over the last 50 years, you have an unfortunate misappraisal of life. It's as good as it gets, and it's very likely to get worse.
Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group then to hell with them.
Bull markets go to people's heads. If you're a duck on a pond, and it's rising due to a downpour, you start going up in the world. But you think it's you, not the pond.
In the LBO field there is a buried "covariance" with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.
The wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don't. It's just that simple.
If you get into the mental habit of relating what you're reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom.
A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.
I know just enough about thermodynamics to understand that if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that's a very stupid way to solve an energy problem.
Three rules for a career: 1) Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself; 2) Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire; and 3) Work only with people you enjoy.
If we mix only a moderate minority share of turds with the raisins each year, probably no one will recognize what will ultimately become a very large collection of turds.
Black-Scholes works for short-term options, but if it's a long-term option and you think you know something [about the underlying asset], it's insane to use Black-Scholes.
Everyone has the idea of owning good companies. The problem is that they have high prices in relations to assets and earnings, and that takes all of the fun out of the game.
We bought a doomed textile mill [Berkshire Hathaway] and a California S&L [Savings & Loan; Wesco] just before a calamity. Both were bought at a discount to liquidation value.
I think track records are very important. If you start early trying to have a perfect one in some simple thing like honesty, you're well on your way to success in this world.
Gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but I think civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.
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.
To some extent, stocks are like Rembrandts. They sell based on what they've sold in the past. Bonds are much more rational. No-one thinks a bond's value will soar to the moon.
I think gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.
Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay were caricatures - they were easy to spot. They were almost psychopaths. But it's much harder to spot problems at companies like Royal Dutch [Shell].
In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables - like the discount warehouses of Costco.
The Internet bubble circa 2000 is the most extreme in modern capitalism. In the 1930s, we had the worst depression in 600 years. Today is almost as extreme in the opposite way.
I remember the $0.05 hamburger and a $0.40-per-hour minimum wage, so I've seen a tremendous amount of inflation in my lifetime. Did it ruin the investment climate? I think not.
Accounting incomes were reduced by discrepancy [ but] "the net amount paid by lawyers for lawyerly discrepancy is close to zippo. In this case, the goddess of justice was blind.
In the 1930s, there was a stretch where you could borrow more against the real estate than you could sell it for. I think that's what's going on in today's private-equity world.
If you rise in life, you have to behave in a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you're a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you're the Bishop of Boston, you shouldn't go.
Warren is one of the best learning machines on this earth. The turtles who outrun the hares are learning machines. If you stop learning in this world, the world rushes right by you.
Organized common (or uncommon) sense -- very basic knowledge -- is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.
Alternatives to gold and currency and to make a big speculative vehicle - I never considered for one second having anything to do with it. I detested it the minute it had been raised.
[With] closet indexing....you're paying a manager a fortune and he has 85% of his assets invested parallel to the indexes. If you have such a system, you're being played for a sucker.
One of the smartest things a person can do is dampen investment expectations, especially with Berkshire. That would be mature and responsible. I like our model and we should do nicely
We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It's a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who's rich and you ask, 'How can I become like you, except faster?'
We both (Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett) 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.
If we've been a little more successful than other people, is because we always realised that the school of life was always open, and if you were not learning more you are falling behind.
It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.
My idea of a good place to shop is Costco - it has these heavily marbled fillet steaks. The idea of eating some wheat thing and washing it down with carrot juice has never appealed to me.
I think it would be a great improvement if there were no D&O insurance . The counter-argument is that no-one with any money would serve on a board. But I think net net you'd be better off.