At Berkshire, I both initiate and monitor every derivatives contract on our books ... If Berkshire ever gets in trouble, it will be my fault. It will not be because of the misjudgments made by a risk committee or chief risk officer.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.

We have provided capital here with a couple of institutions recently. The Federal government did that in the '30s for the RFC and I think there could well be a proper role for government in that.

If you're extremely rich, and you have got children, my theory was, you give them enough so they can do anything, but not enough so they can do nothing.

If the world couldn't see your results, would you rather be thought of as the world's greatest investor but in reality have the world's worst record? Or be thought of as the world's worst investor when you were actually the best?

Buy a cross section of American industry, and if a cross section of American industry doesn't work, certainly trying to pick the little beauties here and there isn't going to work either.

If you own a wonderful business...the best thing to do is keep it. All you're going to do is trade your wonderful business for a whole bunch of cash, which isn't as good as the business, and you got the problem of investing in other businesses, and you probably paid a tax in between. So my advice to anybody who owns a wonderful business is keep it.