Why should it be easy to do something that, if done well, two or three times, will make your family rich for life?

Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.

I think the notion...that liquidity is this - of tradable common stock - is a great contributor to capitalism - I think that is mostly twaddle... The liquidity gives us these crazy booms, which have many problems as well as virtues.

...by regularly reading business newspaper and magazines I am exposed to an enormous amount of material at the micro level.. I find that what I see going on there pretty much informs me about what's happening at the macro level.

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

Even bright people are going to have limited, really valuable insights in a very competitive world when they're fighting against other very bright, hardworking people. And it makes sense to load up on the very few good insights you have instead of pretending to know everything about everything at all times.

It's hard to predict what will happen with two brands in a market. Sometimes they will behave in a gentlemanly way, and sometimes they'll pound each other. I know of no way to predict whether they'll compete moderately or to the death. If you could figure it out, you could make a lot of money.