Confidence is key. You're not going to put your money - you're not going to leave your money with me unless you're confident I'm going to give it back to you.

I won't close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable.

In my opinion, the entire field of investment management, involving hundreds of billions of dollars, would be more satisfactorily conducted if everyone had a good yardstick for measurement of ability and sensibly applied it.

In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal.

If you want your business to survive for 100 years, you've got to make it through every single day for 100 years. It's not enough to do it 99.9% of the time.

That goes back to 1932, although it was really implemented in '33 under Jesse Jones, and it invested in mostly banks initially and preferred stock and that sort of thing. So there are two things needed in the system, the one that's needed overwhelmingly is liquidity. I mean, when people are trying to [unintelligible], there has to be somebody there to buy.

I like to buy things I can understand. I do a lot of research on things.