You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing. I've never borrowed a significant amount of money in my life. Never. Never will. I've got no interest in it.
Our approach is very much profiting from lack of change rather than from change.
Confidence in markets and in institutions, it's a lot like oxygen. When you have it, you don't even think about it. It's indispensable. You can go years without thinking about it. When it's gone for five minutes, it's the only thing to think about.
There's not many businesses where someone can come in and offer to cut the price in half and somebody doesn't think about shifting. But that's the nature of the ratings business.
If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.
You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in - in 2007, we just didn't know it was uncertain. It was - uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn't know it.
I am out of step with present conditions. When the game is no longer played your way, it is only human to say the new approach is all wrong, bound to lead to trouble, and so on. On one point, however, I am clear. I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand ( although I find it difficult to apply ) even though it may mean foregoing large, and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I don't fully understand, have not practiced successfully, and which possibly could lead to substantial permanent loss of capital.
I look at everything. That's my job. I really do, every day. I think about everything.
If you hit a hole in one every hole, you wouldn’t play golf for very long.
The approach and strategies are very similar in that you gather all the information you can and then keep adding to that base of information as things develop. You do whatever the probabilities indicated based on the knowledge that you have at that time, but you are always willing to modify your behaviour or your approach as you get new information. In bridge, you behave in a way that gets the best from your partner. And in business, you behave in the way that gets the best from your managers and your employees.
Derivatives are like sex. It's not who we're sleeping with, it's who they're sleeping with that's the problem.
People always should know better. People don't get - they don't get smarter about things that get as basic as greed.
A Company should be viewed as an unfolding movie, not as a still photograph
Every day that goes by, I mean, if you don't react to Pearl Harbor for a week or two weeks or three weeks, you're behind in the war that you otherwise would have fought.
We say we are trying to buy into businesses with excellent economics, run by honest and able people at a decent price. We buy very few securities, so we look at it as "focused" investing.
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
If principles can become dated, they're not principles.
If you have more than 120 or 130 I.Q. points, you can afford to give the rest away. You don't need extraordinary intelligence to succeed as an investor.
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.
There is no question we have an access stock.
What's nice about investing is you don't have to swing at every pitch.
We also believe candour benefits us as managers. The CEO who misleads often in public eventually misleads himself in private.
If I got a chance to take one percent of the deal either way, I would make that bet.
We always see shifts in employment. If you think about it, if you go back to 1800, it took 80 percent of the labor force to produce enough food for the country. Now it takes less than 3 percent. Well, the truth is that market systems move people around.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.