Some societies are also more optimistic than others: the U.S. and Australia are my two picks Tell a European you think there’s a housing bubble and you’ll have a reasonable discussion. Tell an Australian and you’ll have World War III. Been there, done that!

If stocks are attractive and you don't buy, you don't just look like an idiot, you are an idiot.

Capitalism believes that its remit is exclusively to make maximum short-term profits.

We live on a finite planet. We have finite resources, and we're running out of good, arable land.

Market timing, by the way, is a tag some buy-and-hold investors use to put down anything that involves using your brain. These are the same people who like to watch the locomotive coming and get run down in the name of discipline.

Volatility is a symptom that people have no idea of the underlying value.

The investment business has taught me – increasingly as the years have passed – that people, especially investors (and, I believe, Americans), prefer good news and wishful thinking to bad news; and that there are always vested interests to offer facile, optimistic alternatives to the bad news.