Philanthropists From The United States

"Look for integrity, intelligence and energy."

"Take the job that you would take if you were independently wealthy."

"The problem with municipal finance generally is that, you know, Neville Chamberlain said “not in our time,” in terms of peace and, basically, many politicians think “not in my time” when they’re dealing with fiscal matters. The pension situation, first states, then cities, and so-on, you… it’s absolutely terrible, because really don’t wanna face – they want, they can give promises now which translate into votes, and they don’t really have to with the pensions they really don’t have to deliver on those until they’re long gone. And Puerto Rico, they’ve been kicking the can down the road for a long time, and they even raised new money, I think, not much more than a year ago, a very high price for hedge funds. The answer to financial problems is not more borrowing, more borrowing, but they’ll do it as long as they can and finally the day of reckoning comes and it would have been so much easier to tackle the problem earlier and no, you know, you got all different classes of bondholders and other claimants and they’re gonna fight like crazy. Charlie [Munger] always says, he says, “an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure,” and now you’re in the cure stage in Puerto Rico. "Buffett on Puerto Rico's debt crisis" CNBC (2 May 2016)"

"I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life. "10 Brilliant Quotes From Warren Buffett, America's Second-Richest Person " entrepreneur.com (13 November 2014)"

"What counts for most people in investing is not how much they know, but rather how realistically they define what they don't know. "The genius of Warren Buffett in 23 quotes" MarketWatch (19 August 2015)"

"Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble. "25 Best Warren Buffett Quotes" The Motley Fool (28 September 2014)"

"You can't make a good deal with a bad person. "23 Quotes from Warren Buffett on Life and Generosity" forbes.com (02 December 2013)"

"We're going to move a lot of crude (oil) in this country, and we have to learn how to do it very safely. "Buffett: Moving Oil By Rail Safely Is A Major Industry Concern" Investing.com (24 April 2014)"

"Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. "The Three Essential Warren Buffett Quotes To Live By" forbes.com (20 April 2014)"

"There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace, and those who read their Graham and Dodd will continue to prosper."

"[T]he secret has been out for 50 years, ever since Ben Graham and Dave Dodd wrote Security Analysis, yet I have seen no trend toward in... 35 years... There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult."

"You... have to have the knowledge to... make a very general estimate about the value of the underlying businesses. But you do not cut it close. That is what Ben Graham meant by having a margin of safety."

"The Washington Post Company in 1973 was selling for $80 million in the market. ...[Y]ou could have sold the assets ...for not less than $400 million ...Now, if the stock had declined even further... to $40 million... its beta would have been greater. ...This is truly Alice in Wonderland. I have never been able to figure out why it's riskier to buy $400 million worth of properties for $40 million than for $80 million."

"The greater the potential for reward in the value portfolio, the less risk there is."

"When the price of a stock can be influenced by a "herd" on Wall Street with prices set at the margin by the most emotional person, or the greediest person, or the most depressed person, it is hard to argue that the market always prices rationally. In fact, market prices are often nonsensical."

"I'm convinced that there is much inefficiency in the market."

"It's not like I am reciting... the names of a bunch of lottery winners. ...I knew what they had been taught and ...had some personal knowledge of their intellect, character and temperament. ...[T]his group has assumed far less risk than average; note their record in years when the general market is weak. While they differ greatly in style, these investors are, mentally, always buying the business, not buying the stock. ...[A]ll exploit the difference between the market price of a business and its intrinsic value."

"Very, very few s are managed from a value standpoint."

"Stan [Perlmeter] was a liberal arts major... We happened to be in the same building... Again, it took five minutes for Stan to embrace the value approach."

"[T]he idea of buying dollar bills for 40 cents takes immediately with people or it doesn't take at all. It's like an inoculation. ...It doesn't seem to be a matter of I.Q. or academic training. It's instant recognition, or it's nothing."

"Walter never went to college, but took a course from Ben Graham at night at the . Walter left Graham-Newman [Partnership] in 1955... He knows how to identify securities that sell at considerably less than their value to a private owner. And that's all he does. ...He simply says, if a business is worth a dollar and I can buy it for 40 cents, something good may happen to me. And he does it over and over again."

"Our Graham & Dodd investors... do not discuss beta, the or in returns among securities. ...[M]ost of them would have difficulty defining these terms. The investors simply focus on two variables: price and value."

"The common intellectual theme of the investors from Graham-Doddsville is this: they search for discrepencies between the value of a business and the price of small pieces of that business in the market... through the medium of marketable stocks..."

"Upon leaving [the derivatives business], our feelings about the business mirrored a line in a country song: "I liked you better before I got to know you so well.""

"We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits."

"Putting people into homes, though a desirable goal, shouldn't be our country's primary objective. Keeping them in their homes should be the ambition."

"Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that “Price is what you pay; value is what you get.” Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down."

"I've reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the portfolio after my death — abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term "thinking outside the box.""

"The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down."

"Size seems to make many organizations slow-thinking, resistant to change and smug."

"Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men." If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases."

"Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful."

"Most companies are saddled with institutional constraints. A company's history, for example, may commit it to an industry that now offers limited opportunity. A more common problem is a shareholder constituency that pressures its manager to dance to Wall Street's tune. Many CEOs resist, but others give in and adopt operating and capital-allocation policies far different from those they would choose if left to themselves."

"After all, you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out."

"But a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street — a community in which quality control is not prized — will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest."

"Instead, we try to apply Aesop's 2,600-year-old equation to opportunities in which we have reasonable confidence as to how many birds are in the bush and when they will emerge (a formulation that my grandsons would probably update to "A girl in a convertible is worth five in the phonebook.")."

"The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities—that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future—will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There's a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands."

"Those who attended [the annual meeting] last year saw your Chairman pitch to Ernie Banks. This encounter proved to be the titanic duel that the sports world had long awaited. After the first few pitches — which were not my best, but when have I ever thrown my best? — I fired a brushback at Ernie just to let him know who was in command. Ernie charged the mound, and I charged the plate. But a clash was avoided because we became exhausted before reaching each other."

"We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet."

"Intrinsic value can be defined simply: It is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life. The calculation of intrinsic value, though, is not so simple. As our definition suggests, intrinsic value is an estimate rather than a precise figure, and it is additionally an estimate that must be changed if interest rates move or forecasts of future cash flows are revised."

"Our future rates of gain will fall far short of those achieved in the past. Berkshire's capital base is now simply too large to allow us to earn truly outsized returns. If you believe otherwise, you should consider a career in sales but avoid one in mathematics (bearing in mind that there are really only three kinds of people in the world: those who can count and those who can't)."

"But now for the final exam: If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period? Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. In effect, they rejoice because prices have risen for the "hamburgers" they will soon be buying. This reaction makes no sense. Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices."

"In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond."

"Of course, Charlie and I can identify only a few Inevitables, even after a lifetime of looking for them. Leadership alone provides no certainties: Witness the shocks some years back at General Motors, IBM and Sears, all of which had enjoyed long periods of seeming invincibility. Though some industries or lines of business exhibit characteristics that endow leaders with virtually insurmountable advantages, and that tend to establish Survival of the Fattest as almost a natural law, most do not. Thus, for every Inevitable, there are dozens of Impostors, companies now riding high but vulnerable to competitive attacks."

"The sad fact is that most major acquisitions display an egregious imbalance: They are a bonanza for the shareholders of the acquiree; they increase the income and status of the acquirer's management; and they are a honey pot for the investment bankers and other professionals on both sides. But, alas, they usually reduce the wealth of the acquirer's shareholders, often to a substantial extent. That happens because the acquirer typically gives up more intrinsic value than it receives. Do that enough, says John Medlin, the retired head of Wachovia Corp., and "you are running a chain letter in reverse." ... The acquisition problem is often compounded by a biological bias: Many CEOs attain their position in part because they possess an abundance of animal spirits and ego."

"Just because Charlie and I can clearly see dramatic growth ahead for an industry does not mean we can judge what its profit margins and returns on capital will be as a host of competitors battle for supremacy. At Berkshire we will stick with businesses whose profit picture for decades to come seems reasonably predictable. Even then, we will make plenty of mistakes."

"The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it. In stating this opinion, we define risk, using dictionary terms, as "the possibility of loss or injury.""

"We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children."

"Our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient."

"The most common cause of low prices is pessimism — some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer."