I don't want to give a lecture to this body that's out there. You know, I mean, having had the heart attack, I want to get it back functioning. And as a practical matter, I mean if you were Bear Stearns, and you were a shareholder, you know, you lost 90 to 95 percent of your money. A good many lost their jobs. They lost very cushy lives, many of them.
Charlie and I decided long ago that in an investment lifetime, it's too hard to make hundreds of smart decisions. That judgment became ever more compelling as Berkshire's capital mushroomed and the universe of investments that could significantly affect our results shrank dramatically. Therefore, we adopted a strategy that required our being smart and not too smart at that, only a very few times. Indeed, we now settle for one good idea a year.
If we start deciding, based on guesses or emotions, whether we will or won't participate in a business where we should have some long run edge, we're in trouble.
When you listen to tax-cut rhetoric, remember that giving one class of taxpayer a break requires - now or down the line - that an equivalent burden be imposed on other parties. In other words, if I get a break, someone else pays. Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can however, determine who pays for lunch.
You have to be able to communicate in life and probably schools underemphasize that. If you can't talk to people or write, you're giving up your potential.
It's easy to identify many investment managers with great recent records. But past results, though important, do not suffice when prospective performance is being judged. How the record has been achieved is crucial.
The market system rewards me outlandishly for what I do, but that doesn't mean I'm any more deserving of a good life than a teacher or a doctor or someone who fights in Afghanistan.
If you're extremely rich, and you have got children, my theory was, you give them enough so they can do anything, but not enough so they can do nothing.
We've been in a recession, by any common sense definition, because if you look at the American public, they've got 20 billion - 20 trillion, I should say, worth of residential homes.
Can you know you can have institutions that put curbs on that in various ways, and actually what the banks, you know, they have various capital ratios and that sort of thing, but the banks got around them, I mean, they set up sieves and that sort of thing just to get more leverage. People love leverage when it's working. I mean, it's so easy to borrow money from a guy at X and put it out at X.