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.
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?
If I taught a class, on my final exam I would take an Internet company and ask, 'How much is this company worth?' Anyone who would answer, I would flunk.
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.
You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. And if it can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more. And if you can’t write an intelligent answer to those questions, don’t do it.
It's just that I landed up in a terrific capitalist system. One that pays people who allocate capital extraordinarily well. Intrinsically, I'm not worth as much as somebody who invents something that could improves people's life, or health or whatever.
For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn't work is when you start doing things that you don't understand or because they worked last week for somebody else. The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it's going up.
If you want your business to survive for 100 years, you've got to make it through every single day for 100 years. It's not enough to do it 99.9% of the time.
I've learned mainly by reading myself. So I don't think I have any original ideas. Certainly, I talk about reading Graham. I've read Phil Fisher. So I've gotten a lot of my ideas from reading. You can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don't have to get too many new ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.
You will be right, over the course of many transactions, if your hypotheses are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct. True conservatism is only possible through knowledge and reason.
The only question is whether you’re going to do it today or tomorrow. If you keep saying you’re going to do it tomorrow,
you’ll never do it. You have to get on it today.
A diamond cannot be polished without friction, nor a person perfected without trials. Someone is enjoying shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
Getting fired can produce a particularly bountiful payday for a CEO. Indeed, he can 'earn' more in that single day, while cleaning out his desk, than an American worker earns in a lifetime of cleaning toilets. Forget the old maxim about nothing succeeding like success: Today, in the executive suite, the all-too-prevalent rule is that nothing succeeds like failure.
Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party... the poor and middle class.