Commitment, by its nature, frees us from ourselves and, while it stands us in opposition to some, it joins us with others similarly committed. Commitment moves us from the mirror trap of the self absorbed with the self to the freedom of a community of shared values.

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

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.

If you have a patient in a doctor's office who's just been told they have terminal cancer but there's this operation they could perform right now that might save their lives. ... They have a 90 percent chance of surviving the operation — if you tell them that, they respond one way. If you tell them ... that they have a 10 percent chance of being killed by the operation, they are about three times less likely to have the operation.

He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.

Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.

Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.