The obligation of a society as prosperous as ours is to figure out how nobody gets left too far behind.

It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.

At age 19, I read a book [The Intelligent Investor] and what I'm doing today, at age 76, is running things through the same thought process I learned from the book I read at 19.

If you owe money, you can't pay them out. You just pay for everything, you do smart things, you eventually get very rich.

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?

Credit worthiness is like virginity, it can be preserved but not restored very easily, so it is crazy to play around with it.

The dominant factors affecting control valuations are earning power (past and prospective) and asset values.