I have pledged - to you, the rating agencies and myself - to always run Berkshire with more than ample cash. We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits.

The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble...We want to buy them when they're on the operating table.

The best way in my view is to just buy a low-cost index fund and keep buying it regularly over time, because you'll be buying into a wonderful industry, which in effect is all of American industry... People ought to sit back and relax and keep accumulating over time.

I would say it's more important who the treasury secretary is than who the vice president is. If you want to have a debate here, I'd like a debate between potential treasury secretaries than the vice presidential debate.

Consciously paying more for a stock than its calculated value - in the hope that it can soon be sold for a still-higher price - should be labelled speculation

You don't need to have extraordinary effort to achieve extraordinary results. You just need to do the ordinary, everyday things exceptionally well.

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.