Trust is like the air we breathe--when it's present, nobody really notices; when it's absent, everybody notices.

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.

Investors have to remember: corporate profits are going up, but stocks are going up faster. How can that continue indefinitely? Investors can only earn what companies themselves can earn; the government or the markets themselves don't kick anything in. How can you get anything more out of a farm than what it grows?

The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power.

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

We try to buy businesses with good-to-superb underlying economics run by honest and able people and buy them at sensible prices. That's all I'm trying to do.

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.