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.

If you owe money, you can't pay them out. You just pay for everything, you do smart things, you eventually get very rich.

I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.

We want to use cash. The reason we haven't used our cash two years ago, we just didn't find things that were that attractive. But when people talk about cash being king, it's not king if it just sits there and never does anything. There are times when cash buys more than other times, and this is one of the other times when it buys a fair amount more, so we use it.

More investment sins are probably committed by otherwise quite intelligent people because of "tax considerations" than from any other cause. One of my friends-a noted West Coast philosopher-maintains that a majority of life's errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do. This is certainly the case when an emotionally supercharged element like taxes enters the picture (I have another friend-a noted East Coast philosopher who says it isn't the lack of representation he minds-it's the taxation).

Most business mistakes are irreversible setbacks, but you get another chance. There are two things in life that you don't get another chance at - marrying the wrong person and what you do with your children.

They say the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. The chains you put around yourself now have enormous consequences as you go through life.