Warren Buffett

"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)"

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

"Look for integrity, intelligence and energy."

"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."

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

"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 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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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..."

"I call investing the greatest business in the world ... because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it."

"In my view, for most people, the best thing to do is to own the S&P 500 index fund. People will try and sell you other things because there’s more money in it for them if they do. And I’m not saying that that’s a conscious act on their part. Most good salespeople believe their own baloney."

"You're dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it's like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can stick with Pepsi, you should be O.K."

"Draw a circle around the businesses you understand and then eliminate those that fail to qualify on the basis of value, good management and limited exposure to hard times. ... Buy into a company because you want to own it, not because you want the stock to go up. ... People have been successful investors because they've stuck with successful companies. Sooner or later the market mirrors the business."

"Love is the greatest advantage a parent can give."

"I'll tell you why I like the cigarette business. ... It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's fantastic brand loyalty."

"Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago."

"Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results."

"I like thinking big. I always have. To me it's very simple: if you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big."

"It's a game of a million inferences. There are a lot of things to draw inferences from — cards played and not played. These inferences tell you something about the probabilities. It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time."

"I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It is like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die."

"If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety..."

"Wall Street is the only place that people ride to work in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway."

"Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid."

"We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely."

"Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. once you're above the level of 125. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing."

"If I was running $1 million today, or $10 million for that matter, I'd be fully invested. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return I've ever achieved were in the 1950s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. It's a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that."

"The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble... We want to buy them when they're on the operating table."

"Meine Freunde und ich sind lange genug von einem milliardärfreundlichen Kongress verhätschelt worden. Es ist Zeit, dass unsere Regierung Ernst damit macht, allen gemeinsame Opfer abzuverlangen."

"Es herrscht Klassenkrieg, richtig, aber es ist meine Klasse, die Klasse der Reichen, die Krieg führt, und wir gewinnen"

"„Es herrscht Klassenkampf, meine Klasse gewinnt, aber das sollte sie nicht“"

"„Wenn in Amerika ein Klassenkampf tobt, ist meine Klasse dabei, ihn zu gewinnen.“"