Warren Buffett Quotes (Part 1)
- Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
- We have tried occasionally to buy toads at bargain prices with results that have been chronicled in past reports. Clearly our kisses fell flat. We have done well with a couple of princes - but they were princes when purchased. At least our kisses didn't turn them into toads. And, finally, we have occasionally been quite successful in purchasing fractional interests in easily-identifiable princes at toad-like prices.
- 1981 Chairman's Letters to Shareholders
- Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results.
- 1974 Letter to Shareholders
- Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.
- Berkshire Hathaway 1998 Annual Meeting
- If you're an investor, you're looking on what the asset is going to do, if you're a speculator, you're commonly focusing on what the price of the object is going to do, and that's not our game.
- 1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
- When they open that envelope, the first instruction is to take my pulse again.
- 2001 Annual Meeting after mentioning that the instructions of his succession are sealed in an envelope at headquarters.
- Those who attended (the annual meeting) last year saw your Chairman pitch to Ernie Banks. This encounter proved to be the titanic duel that the sports world had long awaited. After the first few pitches...I fired a brushback at Ernie just to let him know who was in command. Ernie charged the mound, and I charged the plate. But a clash was avoided because we became exhausted before reaching each other.
- 1999 Letter to Shareholders
- We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children.
- 1992 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman's Letter
- In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond.
- Letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, 1997
- A girl in a convertible is worth five in the phonebook.
- Berkshire Hathaway 2000 Chairman’s Letter.
- We're more comfortable in that kind of business. It means we miss a lot of very big winners. But we wouldn't know how to pick them out anyway. It also means we have very few big losers - and that's quite helpful over time. We're perfectly willing to trade away a big payoff for a certain payoff.
- 1999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
- The most common cause of low prices is pessimism - some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.
- 1990 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
- Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. once you're above the level of 125. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.
- BusinessWeek Interview June 25 1999
- Our future rates of gain will fall far short of those achieved in the past. Berkshire's capital base is now simply too large to allow us to earn truly outsized returns. If you believe otherwise, you should consider a career in sales but avoid one in mathematics (bearing in mind that there are really only three kinds of people in the world: those who can count and those who can't).
- 1998 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
- Time is the enemy of the poor business and the friend of the great business. If you have a business that's earning 20%-25% on equity, time is your friend. But time is your enemy if your money is in a low return business.
- 1998 Berkshire Annual Meeting
- Ben's Mr. Market allegory may seem out-of-date in today's investment world, in which most professionals and academicians talk of efficient markets, dynamic hedging and betas. Their interest in such matters is understandable, since techniques shrouded in mystery clearly have value to the purveyor of investment advice. After all, what witch doctor has ever achieved fame and fortune by simply advising 'Take two aspirins'?
- 1987 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
- We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet.
- Berkshire Hathaway Owners Manual[1]
- "If you expect to be a net saver during the next 5 years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period?"Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall."This reaction makes no sense. Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices.
- 1997 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
- We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely.
- The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything--you can wait for your pitch. The problem when you're a money manager is that your fans keep yelling, 'Swing, you bum!'
- 1999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
- The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.
- 1993 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
- If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety...
- 1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
- You leave yourself an enormous margin of safety. You build a bridge that 30,000-pound trucks can go across and then you drive 10,000-pound trucks across it. That is the way I like to go across bridges.
- Financial World, June 13, 1984.
- Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
- Our favourite holding period is forever.
- Letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, 1988
- First, many in Wall Street - a community in which quality control is not prized - will sell investors anything they will buy.
- 2000 Letter to Shareholders
- An irresistable footnote: in 1971, pension fund managers invested a record 122% of net funds available in equities - at full prices they couldn't buy enough of them. In 1974, after the bottom had fallen out, they committed a then record low of 21% to stocks.
- 1978 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
- When returns on capital are ordinary, an earn-more-by-putting-up-more record is no great managerial achievement. You can get the same result personally while operating from your rocking chair. just quadruple the capital you commit to a savings account and you will quadruple your earnings. You would hardly expect hosannas for that particular accomplishment. Yet, retirement announcements regularly sing the praises of CEOs who have, say, quadrupled earnings of their widget company during their reign - with no one examining whether this gain was attributable simply to many years of retained earnings and the workings of compound interest.
- 1985 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
- [The] stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient.
- Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds... any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops.
- It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be.
- CNN Interview, May 25 2005, in arguing the need to raise taxes on the rich.
- There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.
- It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes…In the stock market you don't base your decisions on what the market is doing, but on what you think is rational….Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time.
- The approach and strategies are very similar in that you gather all the information you can and then keep adding to that base of information as things develop. You do whatever the probabilities indicated based on the knowledge that you have at that time, but you are always willing to modify your behaviour or your approach as you get new information. In bridge, you behave in a way that gets the best from your partner. And in business, you behave in the way that gets the best from your managers and your employees.
- I wouldn't mind going to jail if I had three cellmates who played bridge.
- I'll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's fantastic brand loyalty.
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