I think gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.

For many of our shareholders, our stock is all they own, and we're acutely aware of that. Our culture [of conservatism] runs pretty deep.

If (investing) weren't a little difficult, everybody would be rich.

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

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome

In the LBO field there is a buried "covariance" with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.

If it happens every year like clockwork, what's so extraordinary about it?