I call myself the assistant cult leader.

A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they've got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success

It takes almost no capital to open a new See's candy store. We're drowning in capital of our own that has almost no cost. It would be crazy to franchise stores like some capital-starved pancake house. We like owning our own stores as a matter of quality control.

The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.

In the LBO field there is a buried "covariance" with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.

We don't have any miraculous way of avoiding taxes at Wesco and Berkshire.

You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.