You must force yourself to consider opposing arguments. Especially when they challenge your best loved ideas.

To finish first you have to first finish. Don't get in a position where you go back to go. What's interesting is that some guy whose grandfather was a lawyer and a judge-hurriedly going to Harvard Law with a wave of veterans-I was willing to go into so many different businesses. I was constantly going right into the other fellow's business and doing better than the other fellow did. The reason it was possible? Self-education- developing mental discipline, big ideas that really work.

I don't spend much time regretting the past, once I've taken my lesson from it. I don't dwell on it.

Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.

It's a finite and very competitive world. All large aggregations of capital eventually find it hell on earth to grow and thus find a lower rate of return.

You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth.

Beta and modern portfolio theory and the like - none of it makes any sense to me.