The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.

You could take all the gold that's ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that's worth at current gold prices, you could buy all -- not some -- all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?

What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.

Cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.

In economics, you always want to ask 'And then what?'

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

If you knew what was going to happen in the economy, you still wouldn't necessarily know what was going to happen in the stock market.