You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.

If you want your business to survive for 100 years, you've got to make it through every single day for 100 years. It's not enough to do it 99.9% of the time.

[The U.S. Treasury] can borrow basically unlimited amounts. They can stay there for years and years. These assets will be worth more money over time. So when Merrill Lynch sells a bunch of mortgage-related assets at 22 cents on the dollar like they did a month or so ago, the buyer goes - is going to make money, and he's going to make a lot more money if it happens to be an institution like the U.S. government which has very, very cheap borrowing costs.

We're paying maybe 25 percent of the income tax, but the payroll tax is over a third of the receipts of the federal government. And they don't take that from me on capital gains. They don't take that from me on dividends.

You pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus.

I knew a lot about what I did when I was 20. I had read a lot, and I aspired to learn everything I could about the subject.