Warren Buffett Quotes
376 Warren Buffett Quotes
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We’re not in the steel business per se. We’re not in the shoe business, per se. We’re not in any business per se. We’re big in insurance, but we’re not committed to it. We don’t have a mind-set that says you have to go down this road. So we can take capital and move it into businesses that make sense.
Warren Buffett
I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.
Warren Buffett
It baffles us how many people know of Ben Graham, but so few follow. We tell our principles freely and write about them extensively in our annual reports. They are easy to learn. They should be easy to follow. But the only thing anyone wants to know is, ‘what we are buying today?’. Like Graham, we are widely recognised but least followed.
Warren Buffett
The fact that people will be full of greed, fear or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.
Warren Buffett
Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
Warren Buffett
If Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan were to whisper to me what his monetary policy was going to be over the next two years, it wouldn’t change one thing I do.
Warren Buffett
Investment must be rational, if you can’t understand it don’t do it.
Warren Buffett
The first step to recovery is to stop doing the wrong thing.
Warren Buffett
You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will.
Warren Buffett
A lot of great fortunes in the world have been made by owning a single wonderful business. If you understand the business, you don’t need to own very many of them.
Warren Buffett
If a graduating MBA were to ask me, ‘How do I get rich in a hurry?’ I would not respond with quotations from Ben Franklin or Horatio Alger, but would, instead, hold my nose with one hand and point with the other toward Wall Street.
Warren Buffett
All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.
Warren Buffett
I have seen no trend towards value investing in the 35 years I have practised it. There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.
Warren Buffett
A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be misappraised.
Warren Buffett
It is far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. I would rather be certain of a good result than hopeful of a great one.
Warren Buffett
We rarely use much debt and when we do, we attempt to structure it on a long-term fixed rate basis. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet.
Warren Buffett
What could be more exhilarating than to participate in a bull market in which the ‘rewards to the owners of the business become gloriously uncoupled from the plodding performance of the businesses themselves’. Unfortunately however, stocks can’t outperform businesses indefinitely.
Warren Buffett
The ability to raise prices – the ability to differentiate yourself in a real way, and a real way means you can charge a different price – makes a great business.
Warren Buffett
There are certain kinds of businesses where you have to be smart once and the kind where you have to stay smart every day to defend it. Retailing is one of them. If you find a retailing concept that catches on, you have to defend it everyday.
Warren Buffett
Businesses with soft underbellies do not make good investments.
Warren Buffett
The smartest side to take in a bidding war is the losing side.
Warren Buffett
When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
Warren Buffett
Nothing has since changed my point of view on that matter. Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.
Warren Buffett
What counts for most people investing is not how much they know, but rather how realistically they define what they don’t know. Paradoxically when dumb money acknowledges it’s limitations, it ceases to be dumb.
Warren Buffett
Our favourite holding period is forever.
Warren Buffett
[On arbitrage] Deciding whether to employ cash this way requires evaluating four common-sense questions based on information rather than rumour. The probability of the event occurring, the time the funds will be tied up, the opportunity cost and the downside if the event does not occur.
Warren Buffett
Charlie and I pay a great deal of attention to how well our businesses are doing, and we also work to understand the environment in which each business is operating. For example, is one of our businesses enjoying an industry tailwind or is it facing a headwind? Charlie and I need to know exactly which situation prevails and to adjust our expectations accordingly.
Warren Buffett
The financial calculus that Charlie and I employ would never permit our trading a good night’s sleep for a shot at a few extra percentage points of return. I’ve never believed in risking what my family and friends have and need in order to pursue what they don’t have and don’t need.
Warren Buffett
Berkshire has access to two low-cost, non-perilous sources of leverage that allow us to safely own far more assets than our equity capital alone would permit: deferred taxes and ‘float’, the funds of others that our insurance business holds because it receives premiums before needing to pay out losses. Both of these funding sources have grown rapidly and now total about $12 billion. Better yet, this funding to date has been cost-free. Deferred tax liabilities bear no interest. And as long as we can break even in our insurance underwriting – which we have done on average, during our 29 years in the business – the cost of the float developed from that operation is zero. Neither item it should be understood is equity; these are real liabilities. But they are liabilities without covenants or due dates attached to them. In effect, they give us the benefit of debt – an ability to have more assets working for us – but saddle us with none of it’s drawbacks.
Warren Buffett
Good investment ideas are rare, valuable and subject to competitive appropriation just as good product or business acquisition ideas are. Therefore we normally will not talk about our investment ideas. Though we continue to be unwilling to talk about specific stocks, we freely discuss our business and investment philosophy.
Warren Buffett
Charlie Munger, our Vice Chairman, and I really have only two jobs. One is to attract and keep outstanding managers to run our various operations. [Other one is capital allocation] This hasn’t been all that difficult. Usually the managers came with the companies we bought, having demonstrated their talents throughout careers that spanned a wide variety of business circumstances. They were managerial stars long before they knew us, and our main contribution has been to not get in their way. This approach seems elementary: if my job were to manage a golf team – and if Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer were willing to play for me – neither would get a lot of directives from me about how to swing.
Warren Buffett
Some of our key managers are independently wealthy (we hope they all become so), but that poses no threat to their continued interest: they work because they love what they do and relish the thrill of outstanding performance. They unfailing think like owners (the highest compliment we can pay a manager) and find all aspects of their business absorbing.
Warren Buffett
Charlie and I know that the right players will make almost any team manager look good. We subscribe to the philosophy of Ogilvy and Mather’s founding genius, David Ogilvy: ‘If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But, if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.
Warren Buffett
A by-product of our managerial style is the ability it gives us to easily expand Berkshire’s activities. We’ve read management treatises that specify exactly how many people should report to any one executive, but they make little sense to us. When you have able managers of high character running businesses about which they are passionate, you can have a dozen or more reporting to you and still have time for an afternoon nap. Conversely, if you have even one person reporting to you who is deceitful, inept or uninterested, you will find yourself with more than you can handle. Charlie and I could work with double the number of managers we have now, so long as they had the rare qualities of the present ones.
Warren Buffett
We intend to continue our practice of working only with people whom we like and admire. This policy not only maximises our chances for good results, it also ensures us an extraordinarily good time. On the other hand, working with people who cause your stomach to churn seems much like marrying for money – probably a bad idea under any circumstances, but absolute madness if you are already rich.
Warren Buffett
My conclusion from my own experiences and from much observation of other businesses is that a good managerial record (measured by economic returns) is far more a function of what business boat you get into than it is of how effectively you row (though intelligence and effort help considerably, of course in any business good or bad). Some years ago I wrote: ‘When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.’ Nothing has since changed my point of view on the matter. Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.
Warren Buffett
I’ll be happy to accept a lottery ticket as a gift – but I’ll never buy one.
Warren Buffett
We have carefully designed both the company and our jobs so that we do things we enjoy with people we like. Equally important, we are forced to do very few boring or unpleasant tasks.
Warren Buffett
To some, our stand may seem highly eccentric. Charlie and I have long followed David Ogilvy’s advice: ‘Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won’t think you’re going ga-ga’.
Warren Buffett
What’s the sense in getting rich just to stare at the ticker tape all day?
Warren Buffett
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