A diamond cannot be polished without friction, nor a person perfected without trials. Someone is enjoying shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
When you get to my age, you’ll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. That’s the ultimate test of how you’ve lived your life.
Asset-heavy businesses generally earn low rates of return - rates that often barely provide enough capital to fund the inflationary needs of the existing business, with nothing left over for real growth, for distribution to owners, or for acquisition of new businesses
We want to use cash. The reason we haven't used our cash two years ago, we just didn't find things that were that attractive. But when people talk about cash being king, it's not king if it just sits there and never does anything. There are times when cash buys more than other times, and this is one of the other times when it buys a fair amount more, so we use it.
Goldman Sachs saying they might be interested in such an investment. I'm familiar with the company. I've known the management, the current management, Jack Welch before Jeff Immelt. I've known him for decades.
In my opinion, the entire field of investment management, involving hundreds of billions of dollars, would be more satisfactorily conducted if everyone had a good yardstick for measurement of ability and sensibly applied it.
When 40 billion of treasury bills are sold like, seven day treasury bills, at a yield of 1/20th of one percent, that means the whole country is basically at the point virtually, or a lot of the country is at the point of putting the money under the mattress.