Berkshire's whole record has been achieved without paying one ounce of attention to the efficient market theory in its hard form. And not one ounce of attention to the descendants of that idea, which came out of academic economics and went into corporate finance and morphed into such obscenities as the capital asset pricing model, which we also paid no attention to. I think you'd have to believe in the tooth fairy to believe that you could easily outperform the market by seven-percentage points per annum just by investing in high volatility stocks.

It is an unfortunate fact that great and foolish excess can come into prices of common stocks in the aggregate. They are valued partly like bonds, based on roughly rational projections of use value in producing future cash. But they are also valued partly like Rembrandt paintings, purchased mostly because their prices have gone up, so far.

Mankind invented a system to cope with the fact that we are so intrinsically lousy at manipulating numbers. It's called the graph.

Most people will see declining returns [due to inflation]. One of the great defenses if you're worried about inflation is not to have a lot of silly needs in your life - you don't need a lot of material goods.

The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win.

I always like it when someone attractive to me agrees with me, so I have fond memories of Phil Fisher. The idea that it was hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obviously good idea. But 98% of the investment world doesn't think this way.

Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhibit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.