Philanthropists From The United States

"I want you to issue a challenge for me to debate Howard Dean."

"Three more months!"

"They want four more years of hell."

"You said something I didn't say. Now shove it."

"I think I can best do my work as a head of a family, as a nurturer, for the family, meaning a nurturer for Pittsburgh, and in that sense what we do here can be applicable in many places in the world."

"Give a pleasant response (the neutralizer of irritants) — you will be pleasant and receive pleasant responses."

"Give encouragement (the incentive to action) — you will have courage and be encouraged."

"Give hope (the magic ingredient for success) — you will have hope and be made hopeful."

"Give time for a worthy cause (with eagerness) — you will be worthy and richly rewarded."

"Give a kind word (with a kindly thought behind the word) — you will be kind and receive kind words."

"Give a smile to everyone you meet (smile with your eyes) — and you’ll smile and receive smiles..."

"Your most precious, valued possessions and your greatest powers are invisible and intangible. No one can take them. You, and you alone, can give them. You will receive abundance for your giving. The more you give — the more you will have!"

"Be generous! Give to those whom you love; give to those who love you; give to the fortunate; give to the unfortunate; yes — give especially to those to whom you don’t want to give."

"All I want to do is change the world!"

"Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them."

"I feel healthy! I feel happy I feel terrific"

"Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity."

"Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star."

"Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve."

"Be generous! Give!"

"Give good thoughts (nature’s character builder) — you will be good and the world will have good thoughts for you."

"Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken."

"Buffet's electric company in Iowa... There used to be 9 corporate-owned [electric] utilities owned in Iowa. They were rolled up into 2. The people in Johnson City... and 5 or 6 little neighboring communities got together and said, "We want lower electric rates. We've consolidated. Rates should go down." "No way," said the company. So they started organizing to buy out Warren Buffet's company and have municipal power. Everywhere in America that you have municipal power, it's cheaper than corporate [electric] power. Pretty soon they got advice and recommendations and help from the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities... Two prominent Iowa legislators... had a bill that would tax these municipal power agencies, and would hamstring them from any change in their business model... in the future, and that unless they promised to never again help people try to buy out Mr. Buffet's company, they had the votes to get this enacted. ...[A]s Carol Spaziani, the... retired city librarian... and one of the organizers of this drive said, "...I turn on the television and here are these images and these news stories about this beneficent billionaire, Warren Buffet, who is giving away all of this money. What nobody writes about is how he's gouging the people of Johnson City with excessive electricity rates, and that's how he's making his money."

"Warren Buffet controls an electric utility that has operations in the Midwest, Utah and Oregon. Oregon passed a law saying whatever income taxes are embedded in the electric rates paid to this monopoly electric company, must be paid to the government, or the ratepayers get the money back. Warren Buffet's fighting that like mad, because he knows... that company can permanently capture those taxes (if they're very smart about how they handle their finances) and enhance their profits."

"We gave Warren Buffet (another one of his companies) $100 million gift last year. ...[T]he state of New York had to create a special district in Erie County... [T]he justification for this is that Buffalo has the highest unemployment of the cities in New York state, and this would create jobs. It was a call-center for insurance... [A] competitor closed down their call-center, so there were no new jobs created, and... they created it in one of the whitest, wealthiest suburbs where there is virtually no public transportation. Again, transferring money up the chain of command, benefiting the second wealthiest man in America."

"As taxpayers we gave one of Warren Buffet's companies, in 2006, an interest-free loan of $665 million dollars, and he only has to pay half of it back 28 years from now. ...Imagine ...you bought a house in 1980 at the price in 1980. Up until now [2009] you haven't made any payments on the house, and this year you have to pay half in the... dollars you agreed to back then, no adjustment for inflation. Do you think that alone might make you a wealthy man?"

"I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffet, and I... do not see the point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house. Something about the praise lavished upon him for living in austerity while being so rich escapes me; if austerity is the end, he should become a monk or a social worker... becoming rich is a purely selfish act, not a social one. ...[T]here is no need to extol ...greed as a moral (or intellectual) accomplishment."

"The world's second-richest person called on Washington policymakers to adopt fundamental reforms on such costs to address what he called a "national emergency." He said health care eats up 17 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, at a time when many other countries pay only nine or 10 percent of GDP but have more doctors, nurses and hospital beds per capita. "It's like a tapeworm eating at our economic body," Buffett said on CNBC television. "If it was a choice today between Plan A, which is what we've got, or Plan B, which is the Senate bill, I would vote for the Senate bill," he said. "But I would much rather see a Plan C that really attacks costs, and I think that's what the American public wants to see." Rising costs, Buffett said, are holding back an economy that faced an "economic Pearl Harbor" in late 2008 when capital markets seized up."

"What J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were to the Age of Robber Barons, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, as well as digital moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are to the contemporary age of the rule of the 1%. Then as now, the super-rich used governments to write laws and rules to allow them to accumulate unlimited wealth; then as now, creating monopolies by enclosing the commons and killing competition is the strategy for becoming the 1%."

""How can you reconcile destroying the livelihoods of six hundred families," a local county judge wrote to Mr. Buffett at the time (2001). "Surely greater profits can't be more important than the lives of these people," he wrote, pleading with Mr. Buffett to keep the plant open. Mr. Buffett never responded, and the factory was closed just a few months later."

"Warren Buffett, one of the richest guys in the world, openly admits that his effective tax rate is lower than his secretary's. It's time to tell the billionaire class that if they want to enjoy the benefits of America, they have to accept their responsibilities, and they have to start paying their fair share of taxes."

"I asked Buffett how many of his fellow billionaires shared his views. He laughed. “I’ll tell you, not very many,” he said. “They have this idea that it’s ‘their money’ and they deserve to keep every penny of it. What they don't factor in is all the public investment that lets us live the way we do." … It may be surprising to some to hear the world’s foremost capitalist talk in this way, but Buffett’s views aren’t necessarily a sign of a soft heart. Rather, they reflect an understanding that how well we respond to globalization won’t be just a matter of identifying the right policies. It will also have to do with a change in spirit, a willingness to put our common interests and the interests of future generations ahead of short-term expediency."

"Buffett had invited me to Omaha to discuss tax policy. More specifically, he wanted to know why Washington continued to cut taxes for people in his income bracket when the country was broke. ... Buffett's low rates were a consequence of the fact that, like most wealthy Americans, almost all his income came from dividends and capital gains, investment income that since 2003 has been taxed at only 15 percent. The receptionist's salary, on the other hand, was taxed at almost twice that rate once FICA was included. From Buffett's perspective, the discrepancy was unconscionable."

"Buffett believes the most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. A successful investor doesn't focus on being with or against the crowd. The stock market will swing up and down. But in good times and bad, Buffett stays focused on his goals."

"Buffett does not believe that it is wise to bequeath great wealth and plans to give most of his money to his charitable foundation. ... Buffett is not cutting his children out of his fortune because they are wastrels or wantons or refuse to go into the family business — the traditional reasons rich parents withhold money. Says he: "My kids are going to carve out their own place in this world, and they know I'm for them whatever they want to do." But he believes that setting up his heirs with "a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb" can be "harmful" for them and is "an antisocial act." To him the perfect amount to leave children is "enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing." For a college graduate, Buffett reckons "a few hundred thousand dollars" sounds about right."

"Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich, also is making use of a Roth. At the end of 2018, Buffett had $20.2 million in it."

"Boy, if he doesn't give capitalism a good name, who does?"

"Buy stock in a business that's so good that an idiot can run it, because sooner or later one will."

"Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1."

"There's no question that trade can be an act of war, and I think it's led to bad things like the attitudes it's brought out in the United States. We should be looking to trade with the rest of the world. We should do what we do best, and they should do what they do best. With eight countries possessing nuclear weapons, including a few I would call quite unstable, I don't think it's a great idea to design a world where a few countries say, "Haha, we've won" while other countries are envious. … The main thing is that trade should not be a weapon. The United States has become an incredibly important country starting from nothing 250 years ago — there's never been anything like it. And it's a big mistake when you have 7.5 billion people who don't like you very well and you have 300 million people crowing about how well they've done. I don't think it's right and I don't think it's wise. The more prosperous the rest of the world becomes, it won't be at our expense — the more prosperous we'll become and the safer we'll feel and your children will feel someday."

"Tom [Knapp] was a chemistry major at Princeton before the war; when he came back... he was a beach bum. And then one day he read that Dave Dodd was giving a night course in investments at Columbia. Tom took it on a non-credit basis, and he got so interested... that he enrolled at Columbia Business School where he got the MBA... He took Dodd's course again, and took Ben Graham's course. ...35 years later ...I found him on the beach ...he owns the beach!"

"I would like to first introduce our directors. I'm Warren Buffett, and I was born and raised here in Omaha. We have Greg Abel — he was born and raised in Canada, and we have Ajit Jain who was born and raised in India. So we have a very diverse group."

"In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending."

"Confidence comes back one at a time, but fear, is instantaneous."

"I eat like a normal 6-year-old, but if you look at the mortality statistics, I mean, 6-year-olds don't die very often."

"Warren Buffett's Top 10 Rules for Success – YouTube, uploaded by Evan Carmichael, 2015"

"I like to study failure, actually. My partner says, "I want to know where I'll die so I'll never go there." We want to see what has caused businesses to go bad. The biggest thing that kills them is complacency. ... The danger would always be that you rest on your laurels."

"Capitalism is all about somebody coming and trying to take the castle. Now what you need is .... you need a castle that has some durable competitive advantage — some castle that has a moat around it."

"I just read and read and read. ... I have always enjoyed reading."

"There's a whole bunch of things I don't know a thing about — I just stay away from those. So, I stay within what I call my circle of competence."