It's not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ones.

In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables - like the discount warehouses of Costco.

You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.

"[Lawyers who file class-action securities suits] is not a group you would want to marry into your family. "That said, more than half the time the people being sued by the Lerach firm are guilty of outrageous conduct. The problem is, they don't mind (suing) the other half. They are an equal opportunity litigator."

We've had the most massive creation of wealth for people a lot younger than those who formerly got wealth in the history of the world. The world is full of young people who really want to get rich, and when I left school nobody thought it was a reasonable possibility.

Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.

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.