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.

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.

The idea of excessive diversification is madness.

Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay were caricatures - they were easy to spot. They were almost psychopaths. But it's much harder to spot problems at companies like Royal Dutch [Shell].

It would be nice if this [finding really cheap stocks] happened all the time. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

The interesting thing about it to me is the mindset. With all these "helpers" running around, they talk about doing deals. We talk about welcoming partners. The guy doing deals, he wants to do a deal and then unwind it in the near future. It's totally opposite for us. We like to build lasting relationships. I think our system will work better in the long term than flipping deals. I think there are so many of them [helpers] that they'll get in ea h other's way. I don't think they'll make enough money to meet their expectations, by flipping, flipping, flipping.

We've got great flexibility and a certain discipline in terms of not doing some foolish thing just to be active - discipline in avoiding just doing any damn thing just because you can't stand inactivity.