Warren Buffett Quotes

If I taught a class, on my final exam I would take an Internet company and ask, 'How much is this company worth?' Anyone who would answer, I would flunk.

Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.

The patient that's on the floor with the cardiac arrest is not Wall Street. It's the American economy.

I don't really think that, as a society, we [americans] want to confer blessings on generation after generation who contribute nothing to society, simply because somebody in the far distant past happened to amass a great sum of wealth.

The secret is to find what you love to do.I mean, I tell the students look for the job that you would take if you didn't need a job. I mean, it's that simple. And I was lucky enough to find it very early in life. And then the second thing is to have people around you that make feel good every day, and make you a better person than you otherwise would be.

So some guy may know how to make money in cocoa beans, but I don't so I just let him have that. But it's got to be something I understand. It's got to be a business with fundamentally good economics. It's got to be a management that I like and trust and admire. And it's got to be a price that makes sense.

We continue to make more money when snoring than when active.

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.

I think the Congress will do the right thing. I think that they've - you know, they got into certain arguments and they start worrying about assessing blame, and there is a little demagoguery, but in the end, something this important, they'll do the right thing. So this really is an economic Pearl Harbor. That sounds melodramatic, but I've never used that phrase before. And this really is one.

Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies.

My job is essentially just corralling more and more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action.

Never depend on single income. Make investment to create a second source.

With each investment you make, you should have the courage and the conviction to place at least ten per cent of your net worth in that stock

If book knowledge made great investors, than the librarians would all be rich.

Much success can be attributed to inactivity. Most investors cannot resist the temptation to constantly buy and sell.

We've got a wonderful economic formula in this country.

It is more important to say "no" to an opportunity, than to say "yes".

When Berkshire buys common stock, we approach the transaction as if we were buying into a private business.

In my view, [the trade deficit] will create political turmoil at some point...Pretty soon, I think there will be a big adjustment.

I think that both parties should declare the debt limit as a political weapon of mass destruction which can't be used. I mean, it is silly to have a country that has 237 years building up its reputation and then have people threaten to tear it down because they're not getting some other matter.

Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing.

Two rules: 1. Preserve the principal 2. When in doubt, see Rule #1.

Bull markets and Bear markets can obscure mathematical laws, they cannot repeal them.

I tell college students, when you get to be my age you will be successful if the people who you hope to have love you, do love you.

Our policy is to concentrate holdings. We try to avoid buying a little of this or that when we are only lukewarm about the business or its price. When we are convinced as to attractiveness, we believe in buying worthwhile amounts.

We have learned to turn out lots of goods and services, but we haven't learned as well how to have everybody share in the bounty. The obligation of a society as prosperous as ours is to figure out how nobody gets left too far behind.

First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.

I don't need 15 houses. Owning real estate doesn't mean much to me. I don't like to think about things like that. I don't need 12 boats, or even the world's largest boat with a crew of 80. I'd have to take care of them, to worry about them. I get a lot more fun out of life without all the bells and whistles.

Cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.

You pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus.

I was lucky to have the right heroes. Tell me who your heroes are and I'll tell you how you'll turn out to be. The qualities of the one you admire are the traits that you, with a little practice, can make your own, and that, if practiced, will become habit forming.

The three most important words in investing...Margin of Safety.

We try to exert a Ted Williams kind of discipline. In his book The Science of Hitting, Ted explains that he carved the strike zone into 77 cells, each the size of a baseball. Swinging only at balls in his "best" cell, he knew, would allow him to bat .400; reaching for balls in his "worst" spot, the low outside corner of the strike zone, would reduce him to .230. In other words, waiting for the fat pitch would mean a trip to the Hall of Fame; swinging indiscriminately would mean a ticket to the minors.

In a commodity business, it's very hard to be smarter than your dumbest competitor.

We do not have, nor have had, and never will have an opinion about where the stock market, interest rates, or business activity will be a year from now.

It's never paid to bet against America.

Managers that always promise to 'make the numbers' will at some point be tempted to make up the numbers.

I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.

We always see shifts in employment. If you think about it, if you go back to 1800, it took 80 percent of the labor force to produce enough food for the country. Now it takes less than 3 percent. Well, the truth is that market systems move people around.

The active investors will have their returns diminished by a far greater percentage than will their inactive brethren. That means that the passive group - the "know-nothings" - must win.

The big question about how people behave is whether they've got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.

When we really sit back with a smile on our face is when we run into a situation we can understand, where the facts are ascertainable and clear, and the course of action obvious.

The banking business is no favorite of ours. When assets are twenty times equity - a common ratio in this industry - mistakes that involve only a small portion of assets can destroy a major portion of equity. And mistakes have been the rule rather than the exception at many major banks.

Everybody's got a different circle of competence. The important thing is not how big the circle is. The important thing is staying inside the circle.

I would push purchasing power - you push out $1,000 of purchasing to those people, it's going to get - it's going to get spent. And it needs to be spent. They need it. And it should come, to some extent, from guys like me.

When we went crazy, and we did go crazy on residential real estate, it set things in motion that just - the dominoes started toppling.

There are three kinds of people: 1. Innovators. 2. Imitators. 3. Idiots.

Ignore the stock market, ignore the economy, and buy a business you understand.