And your brain doesn't naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows how to play bridge. "for example," people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Well maybe a great bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that's a trained response. Ordinary people, subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies.

Personally, I’ve gotten so that I now use a kind of two-track analysis. First, what are the factors that really govern the interests involved, rationally considered? And second, what are the subconscious influences where the brain at a subconscious level is automatically conclusions in various ways — which, by and large, are useful — but which often malfunction? One approach is rationality… And the other is to evaluate the psychological factors that cause subconscious conclusions — many of which are wrong.

All intelligent investing is value investing - acquiring more that you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.

I'm proud to be associated with the value system at Berkshire Hathaway; I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad.

In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables - like the discount warehouses of Costco.

It's been my experience in life if you just keep thinking and reading, you don't have to work.

What's fascinating . . .is that you could now have a business that might have been selling for $10 billion where the business itself could probably not have borrowed even $100 million. But the owners of that business, because its public, could borrow many billions of dollars on their little pieces of paper- because they had these market valuations. But as a private business, the company itself couldn't borrow even 1/20th of what the individuals could borrow.