I make no effort to predict the course of general business or the stock market. Period. However, currently there are practices snowballing in the security markets and business world which, while devoid of short term predictive value, bother me as to possible long term consequences.
I don't need 15 houses. Owning real estate doesn't mean much to me. I don't like to think about things like that. I don't need 12 boats, or even the world's largest boat with a crew of 80. I'd have to take care of them, to worry about them. I get a lot more fun out of life without all the bells and whistles.
Working with people who cause your stomach to churn seems much like marrying for money - probably a bad idea under any circumstances, but absolute madness if you are already rich.
When we really sit back with a smile on our face is when we run into a situation we can understand, where the facts are ascertainable and clear, and the course of action obvious.
When you get to my age, you’ll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. That’s the ultimate test of how you’ve lived your life.
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.
I mean, in terms of alternatives, some people have suggested for example that why don't we - why isn't America doing what Berkshire Hathaway is doing? Why isn't that a better deal for America?
We have learned to turn out lots of goods and services, but we haven't learned as well how to have everybody share in the bounty. The obligation of a society as prosperous as ours is to figure out how nobody gets left too far behind.
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.
Writing checks to the IRS that include strings of zeros does not bother me ... Overall, we feel extraordinarily lucky to have been dealt a hand in life that enables us to write large checks to the government rather than one requiring the government to regularly write checks to us-say, because we are disabled or unemployed.