Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

We set no volume goals in our insurance business generally-and certainly not in reinsurance-as virtually any volume can be achieved if profitability standards are ignored.

Can you know you can have institutions that put curbs on that in various ways, and actually what the banks, you know, they have various capital ratios and that sort of thing, but the banks got around them, I mean, they set up sieves and that sort of thing just to get more leverage. People love leverage when it's working. I mean, it's so easy to borrow money from a guy at X and put it out at X.

If you buy the things you don't need, you will soon be selling the things that you need.

You shouldn't own common stocks if a 50 per cent decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress.

If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.

If the reason for doing something is that everyone else is doing it, it's not a good enough reason.