Wrigley is a great business, but that doesn't solve the problem. Buying great businesses at advantageous prices is very tough.

Wesco had a market capitalization of $40 million when we bought it [in the early 1970s]. It's $2 billion now. It's been a long slog to a perfectly respectable outcome - not as good as Berkshire Hathaway or Microsoft, but there's always someone in life who's done better.

It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.

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

It takes almost no capital to open a new See's candy store. We're drowning in capital of our own that has almost no cost. It would be crazy to franchise stores like some capital-starved pancake house. We like owning our own stores as a matter of quality control.

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

We only want what success we can get despite encouraging others to share our general view about reality.