Here is a collection of wise quotes from Warren Buffett over the years that can help you with business, life, and your general path to success.
Quotes on knowing yourself
“After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them. To the extent we have been successful, it is because we concentrated on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over rather than because we acquired any ability to clear seven-footers.” — 989 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter
“At Berkshire, we make no attempt to pick the few winners that will emerge from an ocean of unproven enterprises. We're not smart enough to do that, and we know it. Instead, we try to apply Aesop's 2,600-year-old equation to opportunities in which we have reasonable confidence as to how many birds are in the bush and when they will emerge (a formulation that my grandsons would probably update to ‘A girl in a convertible is worth five in the phonebook.').” — 2000 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter
“I don't look to jump over seven-foot bars; I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.”
“I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I'd been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can't run very fast. I'm not particularly strong. I'd probably end up as some wild animal's dinner.” — As quoted in Barack Obama's 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
“A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse—not a remarkable mathematician.”
Quotes on investing
“But a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street — a community in which quality control is not prized — will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.” — 2000 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter
“Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing.”
“I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.”
“I call investing the greatest business in the world … because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.” — Interview in Forbes magazine, November 974
“I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.”
“I'll tell you why I like the cigarette business. … It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's fantastic brand loyalty.” — As quoted in Barbarians at the Gate : The Fall of RJR Nabisco (989), by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
“If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio's market value.”
“In the short term, the market is a popularity contest. In the long term, the market is a weighing machine.”
“Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.” — 2004 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter
“It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”
“Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that ‘Price is what you pay; value is what you get.' Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.”
“Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.”
“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be a more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”
“Success in investing doesn’t correlate with IQ … what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”
“Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”
“The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.”
“The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.”
“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!'” — 999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, as quoted in The Tao of Warren Buffett by Mary Buffett and David Clark
“We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children.” — 992 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter
“What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word selected: You don't have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”
“You're dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it's like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can stick with Pepsi, you should be O.K.” — Interview in Forbes, November 974
“Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.”
“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”
“An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it.”
“But a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street — a community in which quality control is not prized — will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.”
“Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you’d be content to own it in the absence of any market.”
“Buy into a company because you want to own it, not because you want the stock to go up.”
“By the age of 10, I’d read every book in the Omaha public library about investing, some twice. You need to fill your mind with various competing thoughts and decide which make sense. Then you have to jump in the water – take a small amount of money and do it yourself. Investing on paper is like reading a romance novel vs. doing something else. You’ll soon find out whether you like it. The earlier you start, the better.”
“Calling someone who trades actively in the market an investor is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a romantic.”
“Charlie and I would follow a buy-and-hold policy even if we ran a tax-exempt institution.”
“Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.”
“Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.”
“For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments.”
“Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.”
“I bought a company in the mid-'90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I've made lots of dumb decisions. That's part of the game.”
“I call investing the greatest business in the world … because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There’s no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.”
“I don't look to jump over seven-foot bars: I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.”
“I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
“I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them because sooner or later, one will.”
“If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.”
“If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.”
“If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes.”
“In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond.”
“In investing, it is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”
“In the long run managements stressing accounting appearance over economic substance usually achieve little of either.”
“Investors should be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta, gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to look impressive. Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the models. Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”
“It is a gross oversimplification to say that the key to investing is to buy low and sell high. This quote from when Warren Buffett has been the basis of his most successful investments over time and the basis of how you could have avoided the last few bubbles.”
“It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”
“You’re dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it’s like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can stick with Pepsi, you should be O.K.”
“You shouldn’t own common stocks if a 50% decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress.”
“You need to divorce your mind from the crowd. The herd mentality causes all these IQ’s to become paralyzed. I don’t think investors are now acting more intelligently, despite the intelligence. Smart doesn’t always equal rational. To be a successful investor you must divorce yourself from the fears and greed of the people around you, although it is almost impossible.”
“It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price”
“Just because a company does well in a bull market does not necessarily make it a good investment for all markets. Don't follow the greater fool theory of investing, where you buy stock high because you hope to sell it at an even higher price to a greater fool.”
“Keep all your eggs in one basket, but watch that basket closely.”
“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.”
“You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.”
“Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.”
“Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.'”
“When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
“What counts for most people in investing is not how much they know, but rather how realistically they define what they don’t know.”
“What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word ‘selected’: You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”
“We’ve long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children.”
“We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”
“”We select such investments on a long-term basis, weighing the same factors as would be involved in the purchase of 100% of an operating business: (1) favorable long-term economic characteristics;
(2) competent and honest management;
(3) purchase price attractive when measured against the yardstick of value to a private owner; and
(4) an industry with which we are familiar and whose long-term business characteristics we feel competent to judge.””
“We make no attempt to pick the few winners that will emerge from an ocean of unproven enterprises. We’re not smart enough to do that, and we know it. Instead, we try to apply Aesop’s 2,600-year-old equation to opportunities in which we have reasonable confidence as to how many birds are in the bush and when they will emerge.”
“We believe that according the name ‘investors' to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.'”
“We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it. In stating this opinion, we define risk, using dictionary terms, as “the possibility of loss or injury.”
“Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn't. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value.”
“Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”
“There is nothing wrong with a ‘know nothing’ investor who realizes it. The problem is when you are a ‘know nothing’ investor but you think you know something.”
“The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.”
“The most common cause of low prices is pessimism—some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It’s optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.”
“The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.”
“The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth.”
“Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can’t buy what is popular and do well.”
“Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.”
“Our approach is very much profiting from lack of change rather than from change. With Wrigley chewing gum, it’s the lack of change that appeals to me.”
“Our favorite holding period is forever.”
“Rule No. 1: never lose money; rule No. 2: don’t forget rule No. 1.”
“Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don't produce anything. What you hope is that something else comes along and pays you more money for it later on.”
“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
Quotes on self improvement
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”
“It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction.”
“Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.”
“There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”
“We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits.” — 2008 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter
“What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history.”
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
“Honesty is a very expensive gift, don’t expect it from cheap people.”
“Imagine that you had a car and that was the only car you’d have for your entire lifetime. Of course, you’d care for it well, changing the oil more frequently than necessary, driving carefully, etc. Now, consider that you only have one mind and one body. Prepare them for life, care for them. You can enhance your mind over time. A person’s main asset is themselves, so preserve and enhance yourself.”
“It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction.”
“You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.”
“You know… you keep doing the same things and you keep getting the same result over and over again.”
“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”
“There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”
“The only way to get love is to be lovable. It's very irritating if you have a lot of money. You'd like to think you could write a check: ‘I'll buy a million dollars' worth of love.' But it doesn't work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.”
“The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.”
“The most important investment you can make is in yourself.”
“The big question about how people behave is whether they've got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.”
“The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.”
“Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you who you’ll turn out to be.”
“Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.”
“You're going to make mistakes in life, there's no doubt about it. You don't want to make them on the big decisions, who you marry and things like that. So there's no way I'm going to make a lot of business and investment decisions without making some mistakes. I may try to minimize them. I don't dwell on them at all. I don't look back…”
Quotes on success
“I tell college students, when you get to be my age you will be successful if the people who you hope to have love you, do love you.”
“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.”
“It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”
“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.”
“Basically, when you get to my age, you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.”
“Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press.”
“Games are won by players who focus on the playing field –- not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.”
“I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute. ”
“I had a great teacher in life in my father. But I had another great teacher in terms of profession in terms of Ben Graham. I was lucky enough to get the right foundation very early on. And then basically I didn’t listen to anybody else. I just look in the mirror every morning and the mirror always agrees with me. And I go out and do what I believe I should be doing. And I’m not influenced by what other people think.”
“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business.”
“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.”
“If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don't care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.”
“If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%.”
“If you’ve been playing poker for half an hour and you still don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”
“Intensity is the price of excellence.”
“It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”
“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
“What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.”
“We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.”
“There comes a time when you ought to start doing what you want. Take a job that you love. You will jump out of bed in the morning. I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?”
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”
“The best thing is to learn from other guy’s mistakes. [General George S.] Patton used to say, “It’s an honor to die for your country; make sure the other guy gets the honor.” There are a lot of mistakes that I’ve repeated. The biggest one, the biggest category over time, is being reluctant to pay up a little for a business that I knew was really outstanding.”
“Never give up searching for the job that you are passionate about.”
“People succeed in life countless different ways but failures group around a few key themes. As such, you learn more from people's failures than people's successes.”
Quotes on greed and fraud
“Over the years, Charlie [Munger, Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman] and I have observed many accounting-based frauds of staggering size. Few of the perpetrators have been punished; many have not even been censured. It has been far safer to steal large sums with a pen than small sums with a gun.” — 988 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter
“…not doing what we love in the name of greed is very poor management of our lives.”
Quotes on politics and the economy
“A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”
“Putting people into homes, though a desirable goal, shouldn't be our country's primary objective. Keeping them in their homes should be the ambition.” — 2008 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter
“Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We'll break out of it. It takes time.”
“Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone's guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.”
“I am a huge bull on this country. We will not have a double-dip recession at all. I see our businesses coming back almost across the board.”
“I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.”
“I just think that – when a country needs more income and we do, we're only taking in 15 percent of GDP, I mean, that – that – when a country needs more income, they should get it from the people that have it.”
“I think that both parties should declare the debt limit as a political weapon of mass destruction which can't be used. I mean, it is silly to have a country that has 237 years building up its reputation and then have people threaten to tear it down because they're not getting some other matter.”
“I think the most important factor in getting out of the recession actually is just the regenerative capacity of – of American capitalism.”
“If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.”
“In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.”
“There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we've got a system that allows them to do it.”
“The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.”
Quotes on businesses
“Culture, more than rule books, determines how an organization behaves.”
“Having first-rate people on the team is more important than designing hierarchies and clarifying who reports to whom.”
“I learned to go into business only with people whom I like, trust, and admire.”
“I won’t close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable.”
“If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But, if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”
“If your employees, including your CEO, wish to give to their alma maters or other institutions to which they feel a personal attachment, we believe they should use their own money, not yours.”
“In the business world, the rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield.”
“Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it's not going to get the business.”
“When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”
“Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.”
“The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.”
“The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble…We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.”
“Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.”
Quotes on finances
“In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.”
“Do not save what is left after spending; instead spend what is left after saving.”
“I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.”
“I don’t have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It’s like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GDP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don’t do that though. I don’t use very many of those claim checks. There’s nothing material I want very much. And I’m going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.”
“I’m not interested in cars and my goal is not to make people envious. Don’t confuse the cost of living with the standard of living.”
“If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.”
“If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”
Quotes on parenting
“I believe in giving my kids enough so they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing.”
“I would say the most satisfying thing actually is watching my three children each pick up on their own interests and work many more hours per week than most people that have jobs at trying to intelligently give away that money in fields that they particularly care about.”
Quotes on public perception
“In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don’t.”
“In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have worked together, we have never forgone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions.”
“You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn't know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn't know it.”
“It's never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.”
Other interesting quotes by Warren Buffett
“It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked.”
“I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.”
“Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.”
“Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill. ”
“Loss of focus is what most worries Charlie and me when we contemplate investing in businesses that in general look outstanding. All too often, we’ve seen value stagnate in the presence of hubris or of boredom that caused the attention of managers to wander.”
“People always ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom they admire the most.”
“Predicting rain doesn't count. Building arks does.”
“Rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play. For example: (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.”
“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”
“Risk is a part of God's game, alike for men and nations.”
“So smile when you read a headline that says ‘Investors lose as market falls.’ Edit it in your mind to ‘Disinvestors lose as market falls—but investors gain.’ Though writers often forget this truism, there is a buyer for every seller and what hurts one necessarily helps the other.”
“Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
“Stocks of companies selling commodity-like products should come with a warning label: ‘Competition may prove hazardous to human wealth.’”
“Talking to Time Magazine a few years back, Peter Drucker got to the heart of things: ‘I will tell you a secret: Deal-making beats working. Deal-making is exciting and fun, and working is grubby. Running anything is primarily an enormous amount of grubby detail work . . . deal-making is romantic, sexy. That’s why you have deals that make no sense.’”
“The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.”
“We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time.”
“When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.”
“Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation.”
“You have no ability, if you're a financial institution and you're threatened with criminal prosecution, you have no ability to negotiate.”
