Everybody engaged in complex work needs colleagues. Just the discipline of having to put your thoughts in order with somebody else is a very useful thing.”

We tend to buy things - a lot of things - where we don't know exactly what will happen, but the outcome will be decent.

If you, like me, lived through 1973-74 or even the early 1990s... There was a waiting list to get OUT of the country club - that's when you know things are tough. If you live long enough, you'll see it.

Accounting is a big subject and there are huge forces in play. The entire momentum of existing thinking and existing custom is in a direction that allows terrible follies to happen, and the terrible follies have terrible consequences.

We don't have any miraculous way of avoiding taxes at Wesco and Berkshire.

Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one's mind. You see it a lot with T.V. preachers (many have minds made of cabbage) but it can also happen with political ideology. When you're young it's easy to drift into loyalties and when you announce that you're a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out, what you're doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, and you're gradually ruining your mind. So you want to be very, very careful of this ideology. It's a big danger.

We don't like trading agony for money