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.

Investing is forgoing consumption now in order to have the ability to consume more at a later date.

I believe the chance of any event causing Berkshire to experience financial problems is essentially zero. We will always be prepared for the thousand-year flood; in fact, if it occurswe will be selling life jackets to the unprepared.

I think the worst mistake you can make in stocks is to buy or sell based on current headlines.

If you own the only newspaper in town, up until the last five years or so, you have pricing power and you didn't have to go to the office.

I think the most important factor in getting out of the recession actually is just the regenerative capacity of - of American capitalism.

The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.