I think the reason why we got into such idiocy in investment management is best illustrated by a story that I tell about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, "My God, they're purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?" And he said, "Mister, I don't sell to fish." Investment managers are in the position of that fishing tackle salesman.

I do not think you can trust bankers to control themselves. They are like heroin addicts.

[In picking stocks] You really have to know a lot about business. You have to know a lot about competitive advantage. You have to know a lot about the maintainability of competitive advantage. You have to have a mind that quantifies things in terms of value. And you have to be able to compare those values with other values available in the stock market.

I don't invest in what I don't understand. And I don't want to understand Facebook.

The investment game always involves considering both quality and price, and the trick is to get more quality than you pay for in price. It's just that simple.

In the corporate world, if you have analysts, due diligence, and no horse sense, you've just described hell.

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