I'd rather throw a viper down my shirt front than hire a compensation consultant.

The big money is not in the buying and selling ... but in the waiting.

Any year that you don't destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year

I'm not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I've reached that state.

Berkshireis in the business of making easy predictions If a deal looks too hard, the partners simply shelve it.

Size will hurt returns. Look at Berkshire Hathaway - the last five things Warren has done have generated returns that are splendid by historical standards, but now give him $100 billion in assets and measure outcomes across all of it, it doesn't look so good. We can only buy big positions, and the only time we can get big positions is during a horrible period of decline or stasis. That really doesn't happen very often.

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