You'll better understand the evil when top audit firms started selling fraudulent tax shelters when I tell you that one told me that they're better [than the others] because they only sold [the schemes] to their top-20 clients, so no-one would notice.

Anytime anybody offers you anything with a big commission and a 200-page prospectus, don't buy it. Occasionally, you'll be wrong if you adopt "Munger's Rule." However, over a lifetime, you'll be a long way ahead - and you will miss a lot of unhappy experiences.

Proper accounting is like engineering. You need a margin of safety. Thank God we don't design bridges and airplanes the way we do accounting.

Projections are put together by people who have an interest in a particular outcome, have a subconscious bias, and its apparent precision makes it fallacious. They remind me of Mark Twain's saying, 'A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar.' Projections in America are often a lie, although not an intentional one, but the worst kind because the forecaster often believes them himself.

I would argue that a majority of the horrors we face would not have happened if the accounting profession developed and enforced better accounting.

There are exceptional loyalties and there are old fashion ideas about how you get loyalties, and after all the auditorium is full of people who have co-owned shares with the managers for many decades, and in many cases they co-invested when everyone was young and obscure. Also when you come back to a place like that you are celebrating old loyalties, and of course the basic idea behind so much of Berkshire is the old fashioned idea that the best way to get loyalty is to deserve loyalty.

Some years ago one oil company bought a fertilizer company, and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company. And there was no more damned reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies, but they didn't know exactly what to do, and if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil and vice versa.