Investors should remember that their scorecard is not computed using Olympic-diving methods: Degree-of-difficulty doesn't count. If you are right about a business whose value is largely dependent on a single key factor that is both easy to understand and enduring, the payoff is the same as if you had correctly analyzed an investment alternative characterized by many constantly shifting and complex variables.

If you're extremely rich, and you have got children, my theory was, you give them enough so they can do anything, but not enough so they can do nothing.

With housing it's something even more dramatic than that, because most people aspire to own their own home.If you really think that houses prices are going to go up next year and the year after, you feel if I don't buy it this year, I'm going to have to buy it next year.That's not true of an Internet stock. But it's true of a home.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Our system works. Over time, people will live better and better. We have a system that unleashes human potential, and now China has a system that unleashes human potential. We will have interruptions. We overshoot and undershoot sometimes, but your kids and grandkids will live better than you. Over time, we move ahead at a pretty damn rapid rate.

I certainly have no desire to sell a good controlled business run by people I like and admire, merely to obtain a fancy price. However, specific conditions may cause the sale of one operating unit at some point.

All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.