Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be misappraised.

As one of my older friends says, "Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be." Let's take a stab at it, anyway.

It takes 150 years to build an investment bank and only five minutes to convince you to sell me preferred stock in it at a 10% interest rate.

I think people - what people want to do is make [economy] get worse.

If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.

Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing so wide diversification is only required when investors are ignorant. You only have to do a very few things in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.

I've learned mainly by reading myself. So I don't think I have any original ideas. Certainly, I talk about reading Graham. I've read Phil Fisher. So I've gotten a lot of my ideas from reading. You can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don't have to get too many new ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.