If it happens every year like clockwork, what's so extraordinary about it?

If people tell you what you really don't want to hear what's unpleasant-there's an almost automatic reaction of antipathy. You have to train yourself out of it.

Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well.

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

After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See's, we've made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners. These opportunity costs don't show up on financial statements, but have cost us many billions.

Anyone with an engineering frame of mind will look at [accounting standards] and want to throw up.

It's human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it's terrible that managements go along with this.