Nevertheless, as circumstances presently appear, I feel substantially greater size is more likely to harm future results than to help them. This might not be true for my own personal results, but it is likely to be true for your results.

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.

Trust is like the air we breathe--when it's present, nobody really notices; when it's absent, everybody notices.

The American economy is going to do fine. But it won't do fine every year and every week and every month. I mean, if you don't believe that, forget about buying stocks anyway... It's a positive-sum game, long term. And the only way an investor can get killed is by high fees or by trying to outsmart the market.

Do not take yearly results too seriously. Instead, focus on four or five-year averages.

I mean, they were getting the mortgage of some guy in Omaha, you know, securitized a couple of times. I mean he had all these - they had all these types from Wall Street, you know, and they had advanced degrees, and they look very alert, and they came with these - they came with these things that said gamma and alpha and sigma and all that. And all I can say is beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas. They've heard that in Europe.

I have this complicated procedure I go through every morning, which is to look in the mirror and decide what I'm going to do. And I feel at that point, everybody's had their say.