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

People calculate too much and think too little.

The Internet bubble circa 2000 is the most extreme in modern capitalism. In the 1930s, we had the worst depression in 600 years. Today is almost as extreme in the opposite way.

Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime.

Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well.

Why would you want to invest with a guy whose thought process says, "If a second layer of fees is good, then let's add a third layer.

All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there