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

What you really want to do in investments is figure out what's important and knowable. If it's unimportant or unknowable you forget about it.

In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.

We're paying maybe 25 percent of the income tax, but the payroll tax is over a third of the receipts of the federal government. And they don't take that from me on capital gains. They don't take that from me on dividends.

Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner.

Does management resist the institutional imperative?

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.