Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.

It is our argument that a sufficiently low price can turn a security of mediocre quality into a sound investment opportunity - provided that the buyer is informed and experienced and he practices adequate diversification. For, if the price is low enough to create a substantial margin of safety, the security thereby meets our criterion of investment.

The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

Avoid second-quality issues in making up a portfolio unless they are demonstrable bargains.

Always remember that market quotations are there for convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored.

Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.

... the loss of public confidence in the financial community growing out of its own conduct in recent years. I insist that more damage has been done to stock values and to the future of equities from inside Wall Street than from outside Wall Street.