I talked to one accountant, a very nice fellow who I would have been glad to have his family marry into mine. He said, "What these other accounting firms have done is very unethical. The [tax avoidance scheme] works best if it's not found out [by the IRS], so we only give it to our best clients, not the rest, so it's unlikely to be discovered. So my firm is better than the others." [Laughter] I'm not kidding. And he was a perfectly nice man. People just follow the crowd...Their mind just drifts off in a ghastly way.

Using volatility as a measure of risk is nuts. Risk to us is 1) the risk of permanent loss of capital, or 2) the risk of inadequate return.

Litigation is notoriously time-consuming, inefficient, costly and unpredictable.

I think there's an awful lot of twaddle and bullshit on EVA. The whole game is to turn retained earnings into more earnings. EVA has ideas about cost of capital that make no sense. Of course, if a company generates high returns on capital and can maintain this over time, it will do well. But the mental system as a whole does not work.

If it is wisdom you're after, you're going to spend a lot of time on your ass reading.

In my life there are not that many questions I can't properly deal with using my $40 adding machine and dog-eared compound interest table.

The laws of thermodynamic s are such that if the water is getting warmer - and I believe it is - the energy of the weather is going to go up.