I'd say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company (we're the biggest share-holder). They want to be associated with every wonderful image: heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don't want to be associated with presidents' funerals and so-forth.

The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.

Every business tries to turn this year's success into next year's greater success. It's hard for me to see why Microsoft is sinful to do this. If it's a sin, then I hope all of Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiaries are sinners. Someone whose salary is paid by U.S.taxpayers is happy to dramatically weaken the one place where we're winning big?!

I don't think vengeance is much good.

I've been associated with Warren ( Buffett) so long, I thought I'd be just a footnote.

After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See's, we've made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners. These opportunity costs don't show up on financial statements, but have cost us many billions.

Mankind invented a system to cope with the fact that we are so intrinsically lousy at manipulating numbers. It's called the graph.