I don't want to understand Facebook.

A lot of people think if you just had more process and more compliance -- checks and doublechecks and so forth -- you could create a better result in the world. Well, Berkshire has had practically no process. We had hardly any internal auditing until they forced it on us. We just try to operate in a seamless web of deserved trust and be careful whom we trust.

An investment decision in the common stock of a company frequently involves a whole lot of factors interacting ... the one thing that causes the most trouble is when you combine a bunch of these together, you get this lollapalooza effect.

The beauty of a financial institution is that there are a lot of ways to go to hell in a bucket. You can push credit too far, do a dumb acquisition, leverage yourself excessively - it's not just derivatives [that can bring about your downfall].

At most corporations if you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You've got denial, you've got everything in the world. You've got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. And by the way, I do the same thing routinely.

Bull markets go to people's heads. If you're a duck on a pond, and it's rising due to a downpour, you start going up in the world. But you think it's you, not the pond.

Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment - and lord knows I've created a good bit of it - I don't think I've created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with.