Our standard prescription for the know-nothing investor with a long-term time horizon is a no-load index fund. I think that works better than relying on your stock broker. The people who are telling you to do something else are all being paid by commissions or fees. The result is that while index fund investing is becoming more and more popular, by and large it's not the individual investors that are doing it. It's the institutions.

It's human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it's terrible that managements go along with this.

Where you have complexity, by nature you can have fraud and mistakes. You'll have more of that than in a company that shovels sand from a river and sells it. This will always be true of financial companies, including ones run by governments. If you want accurate numbers from financial companies, you're in the wrong world.

With so much money riding on reported numbers, human nature is to manipulate them. And with so many doing it, you get Serpico effects, where everyone rationalizes that it's okay because everyone else is doing it. It is always thus.

Wrigley is a great business, but that doesn't solve the problem. Buying great businesses at advantageous prices is very tough.

We bought a doomed textile mill [Berkshire Hathaway] and a California S&L [Savings & Loan; Wesco] just before a calamity. Both were bought at a discount to liquidation value.

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.