Mankind invented a system to cope with the fact that we are so intrinsically lousy at manipulating numbers. It's called the graph.

Kellogg's and Campbell's moats have also shrunk due to the increased buying power of supermarkets and companies like Wal-Mart. The muscle power of Wal-Mart and Costco has increased dramatically.

Whoever makes you smarter a little earlier in life makes you better

You don't have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long, time.

Stock-picking is like gambling: those who win well, seldom bet, but when they do, they bet heavily.

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.

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.