Quote collection
517 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"All the equity investors, in total, will surely bear a performance disadvantage per annum equal to the total croupiers' costs they have jointly elected to bear. This is an inescapable fact of life. And it is also inescapable that exactly half of the investors will get a result below the median result after the croupiers' take, which median result may well be somewhere between unexciting and lousy."
"You don't have to have perfect wisdom to get very rich - just a bit better than average over a long period of time."
"You don't have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long, time."
"We've got great flexibility and a certain discipline in terms of not doing some foolish thing just to be active - discipline in avoiding just doing any damn thing just because you can't stand inactivity."
"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."
"Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well."
"I don't want to sell credit to people who are going to hurt themselves with it. You should only sell products that are good for the people who use them. Some disagree with this, but I know I'm right. That is to say, you're talking to a Republican who admires Elizabeth Warren."
"The tradition of always looking for the answer in the most fundamental way available - that is a great tradition, and it saves a lot of time in this world."
"For years I have read the morning paper and harrumphed. There's a lot to harrumph about now."
"Suppose you were a real estate investor with a 1/3 interest in the best apartment complex in town, the best mall, and the best office building. Would you feel like a poor, undiversified investor? No! But as soon as you get into stocks, people feel this way. Partly, people need to justify their fees."
"Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment - and lord knows I've created a good bit of it - I don't think I've created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with."
"Recognize reality even when you don't like it-especially when you don't like it."
"They [Mc Donalds] take people and give them a first job, which enables them to get a second job. They do a very good job of educating troubled young people to be good citizens and they're probably more successful than charter schools."
"At Berkshire Hathaway we do not like to compete against Chinese manufacturers."
"What good is envy? It’s the one sin you can’t have any fun at."
"Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa."
"... some important factor doesn't lose its "share of force" just because some "expert" can better measure other types of force."
"I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right."
"It's not a competency if you don't know the edge of it."
"Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant."