Businesspeople From The United States

"I don't think that she knows who Adam Smith was."

"You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment. You don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles, you deal with reliable people, and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite."

"... I regard it as a cinch that a great nation will in due time be Rome. ... Where is Rome? Where is Britain in its heyday? They all pass and so our turn is bound to come some day."

"I see [Bitcoin as] an artificial speculative medium that people are buying just because they think they can sell it to somebody else at a higher price, even though it inherently has no intrinsic value. So, I regard the whole business as anti-social, stupid, immoral. [...] I regard the thing as a combination of dementia and immorality, and I think the people that are pushing it are a disgrace."

"Neither Warren nor I have ever used any fancy math in business — and neither did Ben Graham who taught Warren. Everything I have ever done in business could be done with the simplest algebra and geometry and addition and multiplication and so forth. I never used calculus for any practical work in my whole damn life — and I was a perfect whiz at it when they taught it to me."

"How do these super-smart people with all these degrees and higher mathematics end up doing these dumb things? I think it's explainable by the old proverb that to the man with a hammer every problem looks pretty much like a nail. They've learned these techniques and they just twist the problem so it fits the solution — which is not the way to do it."

"You can't give the average Wall Street CEO really lenient standards of accounting and expect the figures to be good. The accountant is like the referee in soccer. The accountant has to be the adult that prevents the mayhem. Accountants don't want to be the adults because it causes liability, it causes responsibility, it causes difficulty ... they failed us terribly."

"Our investment style has been given a name - focus investing - which implies ten holdings, not one hundred or four hundred. The idea that it is hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obvious idea. But 98% of the investment world does not think this way. It's been good for us."

"You have to learn all the big ideas in the key disciplines in a way that they're in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life. If you do that, I solemnly promise you that one day you'll be walking down the street and you'll look to your right and left and you’ll think "my heavenly days, I'm now one of the few competent people in my whole age cohort." If you don't do it, many of the brightest of you will live in the middle ranks or in the shallows."

"The hard part of the process for most people is the first $100,000. If you have a standing start at zero, getting together $100,000 is a long struggle for most people."

"The first $100,000 is a bitch, but you gotta do it. I don’t care what you have to do — if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn’t purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit."

"... much of what is taught in modern corporate finance courses is twaddle."

"Obviously, you have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double-entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention. And it's not that hard to understand. But you have to know enough about it to understand its limitations — because although accounting is the starting place, it's only a crude approximation. And it's not very hard to understand its limitations. For example, everyone can see that you have to more or less just guess at the useful life of a jet airplane or anything like that. Just because you express the depreciation rate in neat numbers doesn't make it anything you really know."

"I'm glad there's OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet."

"The two premodern religions were ancestor worship and nature worship (see "The Ancient City" by Fustel de Coulanges). The two postmodern religions are evidently identitarianism and environmentalism. Is this a coincidence, or something deeper?"

"The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges -- the single best book I have found on who we are and how we got here."

"Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?"

"The process of planning is very valuable, for forcing you to think hard about what you are doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless"

"Software is eating the world"

"[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers."

"The amazing thing about Jeep is that no one thinks of it as an American brand—it’s nationally neutral"

"People who fear losing their jobs start lying"

"The electrification of the automobile is inevitable."

"He doesn't do anything small. Everything he does, he does right."

"In business you wind up trying a lot of things, most of which won’t work. The way you become a good business person is to fail, fail, fail and fail."

"When you're in the middle of nowhere and you see something moving in the jungle, you're forced to become a creative problem solver."

"Security is for cadavers."

"The only politician to be a rising star in three decades."

"at some point numbers do count."

"While the vast majority of America's philanthropic heavyweights choose to address traditional and tangible social needs — feeding the hungry, curing the sick, subsidizing the arts — Templeton has something else in mind. He wants to make an impact on the world of ideas. Templeton's controversial goal: to reconcile the worlds of science and religion. … When he hears scientists quarrel with believers, he thinks both sides are missing the broader point. "What I'm trying to do is say: 'Don't try to argue — maybe you're both right'...""

"Those who spend too much will eventually be owned by those who are thrifty."

"Work at being a humble person."

"We may find the Divine to be 3,000 times what we think it is now. It's like asking the tulip there to explain you. The tulip is a beautiful creation, with millions of atoms cooperating with each other to produce great beauty, but ask that tulip to talk about you, and it can't do it. It doesn't have those perceptive abilities. Wouldn't it be conceited to suggest that I had the abilities to describe the deity?"

"We hope that there will be nothing that conflicts with anybody's religion or faith. We would never say a person's religion is not effective. We say, "Would you be interested in something more effective?" We always put things in an optimistic, progressive perspective. Do you want to make your prayers more effective? Not that they are not effective, but do you want to help them become more effective?"

"The question is not is there a God, but is there anything else except God? God is everyone and each of us is a little bit."

"The other boys at Yale came from wealthy families, and none of them were investing outside the United States, and I thought, 'That is very egotistical. Why be so shortsighted or near-sighted as to focus only on America? Shouldn't you be more open-minded?"

"The objective of our religious foundations is to teach people that they are hurting themselves when they say they believe something. What we should realize is we know almost nothing about God and therefore we should be eager to search and to learn."

"The main focus in my life now is to open people's minds so no one will be so conceited that they think they have the total truth. They should be eager to learn, to listen, to research and not to confine, to hurt, to kill, those who disagree with them."

"The correct description is that we try every day to become more humble when we talk about divinity, we try to realize how little we know and how open minded we should be. It's self centered to think that human beings, as limited as we are, can describe divinity."

"Let's worship Divinity, but understand the divinity we worship is beyond our comprehension."

"In my 45-year career as an investment counselor, humility did show me the need for worldwide diversification to reduce risk. That career did help me to become more and more humble because statistics showed that when I advised a client to buy one stock to replace another, about one-third of the time the client would have done better to ignore my advice. In other endeavors, humility about how little I know has encouraged me to listen more carefully and more wisely."

"I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago."

"If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search."

"I thought, I'm only going to be on this planet once, and only for a short time. What can I do with my life that will lead to permanent benefits?"

"I served for 42 years on the board of trustees of the largest Presbyterian seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and we had brilliant people — teachers and students both — but they did not come up with many new concepts. They weren't invited to come up with new concepts. Anybody who had come up with a new concept would have been under suspicion for being out of step with the tradition or out of step with the teachings of the church."

"I have no quarrel with what I learned in the Presbyterian church — I am still an enthusiastic Christian. But why shouldn't I try to learn more? Why shouldn't I go to Hindu services? Why shouldn't I go to Muslim services? If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more."

"I focus on spiritual wealth now, and I'm busier, more enthusiastic, and more joyful than I have ever been."

"High ethics and religious principles form the basis for success and happiness in every area of life."

"We are trying to persuade people that no human has yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities. So we are encouraging people to start using the same methods of science that have been so productive in other areas, in order to discover spiritual realities."

"The four most expensive words in the English language are "this time it’s different.""