Over the very long term, history shows that the chances of any business surviving in a manner agreeable to a company's owners are slim at best.

Tthe first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.... You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life.

Economic systems work better when there's an extreme reliability ethos. And the traditional way to get a reliability ethos, at least in past generations in America, was through religion. The religions instilled guilt. ... And this guilt, derived from religion, has been a huge driver of a reliability ethos, which has been very helpful to economic outcomes for man.

The stupid and dishonest accountants allowed the genie of totally inappropriate accounting to descend on derivatives books. And once this has happened - people get status, etc. - it's impossible to get it back into the bottle.

A lot of opportunities in life tend to last a short while, due to some temporary inefficiency... For each of us, really good investment opportunities aren't going to come along too often and won't last too long, so you've got to be ready to act and have a prepared mind.

There's a lot wrong [with American universities]. I'd remove 3/4 of the faculty - everything but the hard sciences. But nobody's going to do that, so we'll have to live with the defects. It's amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don't see the big picture.

For some odd reason, I had an early and extreme multidisciplinary cast of mind. I couldn't stand reaching for a small idea in my own discipline when there was a big idea right over the fence in somebody else's discipline. So I just grabbed in all directions for the big ideas that would really work.