You shouldn't own common stocks if a 50 per cent decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress.

Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won't change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO's pay.

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. The person sitting in the shade now should be grateful for the person who planted and tended that tree. That includes all those benefactors of humanity throughout history that created, invented, financed, produced, maintained and improved all that we enjoy today.

We are trading away a little bit of our country all the time for this access consumption that we have over what we've produced. That is not good. I think it's terrible over time. But our country's productive grows enough so we actually can do that, and we'll still be better off. We just don't be as well off as if we hadn't done it.

I bought my first stock in 1942, in the summer of '42. I was 11 years old. And so 75 years have gone by. And I have never known what the market's going to do the next day. And that's not my game. My game is to decide whether I'm in the right economy, which America's definitely been ever since that time. The Dow has gone from 100 to 21,000 during that time. And no matter what the headlines say, or terrible things are happening - we were losing the war in the Pacific when I first bought stocks.

We also believe candour benefits us as managers. The CEO who misleads often in public eventually misleads himself in private.

Nevertheless, as circumstances presently appear, I feel substantially greater size is more likely to harm future results than to help them. This might not be true for my own personal results, but it is likely to be true for your results.