The idea that it's smart to allow Wall Street firms, with this "too big to fail" imprimatur, to become hedge funds again - it's unconscionable. You're essentially saying we're going to take some elites in our society and let them roll the bones in the marketplace, and if it works out they get rich, and if it doesn't work out the taxpayer comes in again. That seems absolutely crazy to me. That seems to be where they're headed. I mean, maybe they're not and I'm wrong. Maybe they'll do sensible things. It's hard to know! There doesn't seem to be a plan.

the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.

You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before.

In Wall Street now, you have to hide what you're doing. It's more fun when you don't have to do that. But I don't think its sense of purpose has changed at all.

At SGI board meetings... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.

They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.

Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .