I make plenty of mistakes and I'll make plenty more mistakes, too. That's part of the game. You've just got to make sure that the right things overcome the wrong ones.

People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started.

The much-maligned idle rich have received a bad rap: They have maintained their wealth while many There is scarcely an instance of a man who has made a fortune by speculation and kept it. Andrew Carnegie of the energetic rich, aggressive real estate operators, corporate acquirers, oil drillers, etc. have their fortunes disappear.

If you cannot control your emotions, you cannot control your money.

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.

The big question about how people behave is whether they've got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.

We try to exert a Ted Williams kind of discipline. In his book The Science of Hitting, Ted explains that he carved the strike zone into 77 cells, each the size of a baseball. Swinging only at balls in his "best" cell, he knew, would allow him to bat .400; reaching for balls in his "worst" spot, the low outside corner of the strike zone, would reduce him to .230. In other words, waiting for the fat pitch would mean a trip to the Hall of Fame; swinging indiscriminately would mean a ticket to the minors.