Anyone with an engineering frame of mind will look at [accounting standards] and want to throw up.

I think we have some special talents. That being said, I think it's dangerous to rely on special talents - it's better to own lots of monopolistic businesses with unregulated prices. But that's not the world today. We have made money exercising our talents and will continue to do so.

If you rise in life, you have to behave in a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you're a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you're the Bishop of Boston, you shouldn't go.

A different set of incentives from rising in an economic establishment where the rewards system, again, the reinforcement, comes from being a truffle hound. That's what Jacob Viner, the great economist called it: the truffle hound - an animal so bred and trained for one narrow purpose that he wasn't much good at anything else, and that is the reward system in a lot of academic departments.

There has never been a master plan. Anyone who wanted to do it, we fired because it takes on a life of its own and doesn't cover new reality. We want people taking into account new information.

Being short and seeing a promoter take the stock up is very irritating. It's not worth it to have that much irritation in your life.

I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues - they may know a lot of French however.