Warren Buffett Quotes

Would you rather be the world's greatest lover, but have everyone think you're the world's worst lover? Or would you rather be the world's worst lover but have everyone think you're the world's greatest lover? Now, that's an interesting question.

If you're in a card game and you can't figure out who the patsy is, you're it.

We have long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good.

I never buy anything unless I can fill out on a piece of paper my reasons. I may be wrong, but I would know the answer to that ...I'm paying $32 billion today for the Coca Cola Company because... If you can't answer that question, you shouldn't buy it. If you can answer that question, and you do it a few times, you'll make a lot of money.

We don't have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.

The one piece of advice I can give you is, do what turns you on. Do something that if you had all the money in the world, you’d still be doing it. You’ve got to have a reason to jump out of bed in the morning.

My father was the best person i've ever known.

Fund consultants like to require style boxes such as "long-short," "macro," "international equities." At Berkshire our only style box is "smart."

Intensity is the price of excellence.

A fool and his money are soon invited everywhere.

SUPPOSE that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. This is a good one, he says enthusiastically. I'm in it, and I think you should be, too.

Energy deregulation will be the largest transfer of wealth in history.

So if you are evaluating others (or yourself!) in the investment field, think out some standards - apply them - interpret them.

The capital gains tax is 15 percent now. So I sit there in my office and I make a lot of money by capital gains, and I pay 15 percent, and I pay no payroll tax on it.

At age 19, I read a book [The Intelligent Investor] and what I'm doing today, at age 76, is running things through the same thought process I learned from the book I read at 19.

In economics, you always want to ask 'And then what?'

When you build a bridge, you insist that it can carry 30,000 pounds, but you only drive 10,000-pound trucks across it. And that same principle works in investing.

I can do anything I want, basically, as long as it doesn't involve athletic ability, or something like that.

I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the finanical system to let me do what I love doing-and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that.

If you don't feel comfortable owning something for 10 years, then don't own it for 10 minutes.

Read Ben Graham and Phil Fisher read annual reports, but don't do equations with Greek letters in them.

I did not think I would see the day when, you know, an AIG would not be able to have its checks clear.

Knowing the edge of your competency is important. If you think you know more than you do, you will get in trouble.

I asked him what he wanted to do for his career, and he replied that he wanted to go into a particular field, but thought he should work for McKinsey for a few years first to add to his resume. To me that's like saving sex for your old age. It makes no sense.

When Berkshire Hathaway laid out three billion dollars for GE today, we didn't spend it, we invested it. When the Federal government buys the mortgages, they're not spending it, they're investing it. Now, they're investing it in distress type assets but they're buying them at distress prices if they buy them at market. It's the kind of stuff I love to do. I just don't have 700 million. Maybe we could go in it together.

It's easy to identify many investment managers with great recent records. But past results, though important, do not suffice when prospective performance is being judged. How the record has been achieved is crucial.

By periodically investing in an index fund, the know-nothing investors can actually outperform most investment professionals.

Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party... the poor and middle class.

There's not many businesses where someone can come in and offer to cut the price in half and somebody doesn't think about shifting. But that's the nature of the ratings business.

I'll take the deal, whatever you want to do.

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.

There's always a mismatch. I mean, you know, as the economy evolves, it reallocates resources. Now, the real problem, in my view, is - this has been - the prosperity has been unbelievable for the extremely rich people. If you go to 1982, when Forbes put on their first 400 list, those people had $93 billion. They now they have $2.4 trillion, 25 for one. That is - this has been a prosperity that's been disproportionately rewarding to the people on top.

I think the rest of the country should be paying less, the 95 percent that [Barack] Obama talks about or maybe even a little higher than that.

If I were the treasury secretary or head of the Fed, you know, I would try to scare the hell the out of the private sector and say, you better save this because you're going down with the ship.

Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.

The problem with commodities is that you are betting on what someone else would pay for them in six months. The commodity itself isn't going to do anything for you....it is an entirely different game to buy a lump of something and hope that somebody else pays you more for that lump two years from now than it is to buy something that you expect to produce income for you over time.

If you expect to continue to purchase stocks throughout your life, you should welcome price declines as a way to add stocks more cheaply to your portfolio.

A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.

Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.

If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you need very little in the way of a margin of safety.

During inflation, Goodwill is the gift that keeps on giving.

What's nice about investing is you don't have to swing at every pitch.

It isn't given to man to be able to run a financial institution where different interest-rate scenarios will prevail on all of that so as to produce kind of smooth, regular earnings from a very large base to start with.

Success in investing doesn’t correlate with I.Q. Once you are above the level of 25; once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

The nature of democracy is such that when there's - there'll be revulsion, obviously, towards - that's never going to happen again.

You need a lot of curiosity for a long, long time.

Remember that the stock market is manic-depressive.

I'm not worried they're all about the investments we make. I mean, listen, this country - we've got $46,000 or $47,000 of GDP per capita. Now, we've done pretty darn well. We'll do better in the future.