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

Benign neglect, bordering on sloth, remains the hallmark of our investment process.

When the brothel burns down, even the pretty girls have to run out.

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

The gross profits in many workouts appear quite small. It's a little like looking for parking meters with some time left on them. However, the predictability coupled with a short holding period produces quite decent average annual rates of return after allowance for the occasional substantial loss.

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.

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.