We make investment decisions based on our evaluation of the most profitable combination of probabilities.

I'm just lucky to have been in the right place at the right time. Another place, another time, I wouldn't have been as successful. Society enabled me to make my money and my money should go to society.

And people really behaved in a fraudulent way or something, we'll go back and find the culprits later on. But that really isn't the problem we have. I mean that's where it came from, though. We leveraged up and if you have a 20 percent fall in value of a $20 trillion asset, that's $4 trillion. And when $4 trillion lands - losses land in the wrong part of this economy, it can gum up the whole place.

The value of a business is the cash it's going to produce in the future.

Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner.

The problem with commodities is that you are betting on what someone else would pay for them in six months. The commodity itself isn't going to do anything for you....it is an entirely different game to buy a lump of something and hope that somebody else pays you more for that lump two years from now than it is to buy something that you expect to produce income for you over time.

The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.