Value investing by its very nature is contrarian.

A margin of safety is achieved when securities are purchased at prices sufficiently below underlying value to allow for human error, bad luck, or extreme volatility in a complex, unpredictable and rapidly changing world.

Why should the immediate opportunity set be the only one considered, when tomorrow's may well be considerably more fertile than today's?

The stock market is the story of cycles and of the human behavior that is responsible for overreactions in both directions.

Almost no one will accept responsibility for his or her role in precipitating a crisis: not leveraged speculators, not willfully blind leaders of financial institutions, and certainly not regulators, government officials, ratings agencies or politicians.

The government can indefinitely control both short-term and long-term interest rates.

In a crisis, stocks of financial companies are great investments, because the tide is bound to turn. Massive losses on bad loans and soured investments are irrelevant to value; improving trends and future prospects are what matter, regardless of whether profits will have to be used to cover loan losses and equity shortfalls for years to come.