I've never been very fully employed either but just think of what it's like, you know, to go home with a mortgage payment you know and kids and everything else. My dad had that happen to him in the early '30s.
Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. The person sitting in the shade now should be grateful for the person who planted and tended that tree. That includes all those benefactors of humanity throughout history that created, invented, financed, produced, maintained and improved all that we enjoy today.
An investor should ordinarily hold a small piece of an outstanding business with the same tenacity that an owner would exhibit if he owned all of that business.
You will be right, over the course of many transactions, if your hypotheses are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct. True conservatism is only possible through knowledge and reason.
In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't.
Anything can happen in stock markets and you ought to conduct your affairs so that if the most extraordinary events happen, that you're still around to play the next day.
I have never been able to understand why the tax comes as such a body blow to many people since the rate on long-term capital gain is lower than on most likes of endeavor (tax policy indicated digging ditches is regarded as socially less desirable than shuffling stock certificates).
There's always a mismatch. I mean, you know, as the economy evolves, it reallocates resources. Now, the real problem, in my view, is - this has been - the prosperity has been unbelievable for the extremely rich people. If you go to 1982, when Forbes put on their first 400 list, those people had $93 billion. They now they have $2.4 trillion, 25 for one. That is - this has been a prosperity that's been disproportionately rewarding to the people on top.
I've made money over the years by buying into good companies, run by good people, at attractive prices. And I don't try and make it out of buying into the market at one point and selling at another point.
Never do anything in life if you would be ashamed of seeing it printed on the front page of your hometown newspaper for your friends and family to see.
We try to buy businesses with good-to-superb underlying economics run by honest and able people and buy them at sensible prices. That's all I'm trying to do.
I have this complicated procedure I go through every morning, which is to look in the mirror and decide what I'm going to do. And I feel at that point, everybody's had their say.