I spend twelve hours a week - a little over 10% of my waking hours - playing the game. Now I am trying to figure out how to get by on less sleep in order to fit in a few more hands.
I believe the chance of any event causing Berkshire to experience financial problems is essentially zero. We will always be prepared for the thousand-year flood; in fact, if it occurswe will be selling life jackets to the unprepared.
I may have more money than you, but money doesn't make the difference. If
there is any difference between you and me, it may simply be that I get up and have a chance to do what I love to do, every day. If you learn anything from me, this is the best advice I can give you.
We do not have, nor have had, and never will have an opinion about where the stock market, interest rates, or business activity will be a year from now.
Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. The person sitting in the shade now should be grateful for the person who planted and tended that tree. That includes all those benefactors of humanity throughout history that created, invented, financed, produced, maintained and improved all that we enjoy today.
If you've got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper, if you have a network television station - I'm talking of the past - you know, your idiot nephew could run it. And if you've got a really good business, it doesn't make any difference.
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.
[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.
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.