Well, the questioner came from Singapore, which has perhaps the best economic record in the history of developing an economy. And therefore he referred to 15 percent per annum as modest. It's not modest, it's arrogant.

They [Mc Donalds] take people and give them a first job, which enables them to get a second job. They do a very good job of educating troubled young people to be good citizens and they're probably more successful than charter schools.

The idea of excessive diversification is madness.

For society, the Internet is wonderful, but for capitalists, it will be a net negative. It will increase efficiency, but lots of things increase efficiency without increasing profits. It is way more likely to make American businesses less profitable than more profitable. This is perfectly obvious, but very little understood.

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.

The normal expectancy of the average investor - for example, the pension funds of AT&T or IBM - is 6% for a long time.

What good is envy? It’s the one sin you can’t have any fun at.