I mean, if Pearl Harbor came along, you could have said the planning was wrong by the military ahead of time or maybe the battleships shouldn't have all been in the harbor and all that kind of thing.

Managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers are the beginning, not the end, of business valuation.

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 bought my first stock in 1942, in the summer of '42. I was 11 years old. And so 75 years have gone by. And I have never known what the market's going to do the next day. And that's not my game. My game is to decide whether I'm in the right economy, which America's definitely been ever since that time. The Dow has gone from 100 to 21,000 during that time. And no matter what the headlines say, or terrible things are happening - we were losing the war in the Pacific when I first bought stocks.

The managers at fault periodically report on the lesson they have learned from the latest disappointment. They then usually seek out future lessons.

Don't settle for anything other than your passion - if you're lucky enough to find it.

As an investor with small capital, one should prefer businesses that have high returns on capital and that require little incremental investment to grow.