I'm very pleased when the smartest people come [to the U.S.] and almost never pleased when the very bottom of the mental barrel comes in.

I would argue that a majority of the horrors we face would not have happened if the accounting profession developed and enforced better accounting.

We have found in a long life that one competitor is frequently enough to ruin a business.

The cost of being a publicly traded stock has gone way, way up. It doesn't make sense for a little company to be public anymore. A lot of little companies are going private to be rid of these burdensome requirements.

It's very useful to have a good grasp of all the big ideas in hard and soft science. A, it gives perspective. B, it gives a way for you to organize and file away experience in your head, so to speak.

[With] closet indexing....you're paying a manager a fortune and he has 85% of his assets invested parallel to the indexes. If you have such a system, you're being played for a sucker.

I see almost no change in the price of the composite product that flows through Costco I don't feel sorry for the people who pay $27 million for an 8,000-square-foot condo in Manhattan. So inflation comes in places.