Asset-heavy businesses generally earn low rates of return - rates that often barely provide enough capital to fund the inflationary needs of the existing business, with nothing left over for real growth, for distribution to owners, or for acquisition of new businesses

In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.

In a commodity business, it's very hard to be smarter than your dumbest competitor.

Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you've given yourself the best chance in life you can.

I think the rest of the country should be paying less, the 95 percent that [Barack] Obama talks about or maybe even a little higher than that.

In other words, the percentage change in book value in any given year is likely to be reasonably close to that year's change in intrinsic value.

The fundamental basis of above-average performance in the long run is sustainable competitive advantage.