It took us months of buying all the Coke stock we could to accumulate $1 billion worth - equal to 7% of the company. It's very hard to accumulate major positions.

Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.

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

The general culture of investment banking has deteriorated over the years. We did a $6 million deal years ago for Diversified Retailing and we were rigorously and intelligently screened. They bankers cared and wanted to protect their clients. The culture now is that anything that can be sold for a profit will be. 'Can you sell it?' is the moral test, and that's not an adequate test.

Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don't need these kinds of innovation in finance. It's OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets.

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

I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it. Some people, like some of the women I know, have a black belt in spending. They were born with that. But what they gave me was a black belt in chutzpah.