The idea of excessive diversification is madness.

Wesco had a market capitalization of $40 million when we bought it [in the early 1970s]. It's $2 billion now. It's been a long slog to a perfectly respectable outcome - not as good as Berkshire Hathaway or Microsoft, but there's always someone in life who's done better.

Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.

It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.

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

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.

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