I mean, they were getting the mortgage of some guy in Omaha, you know, securitized a couple of times. I mean he had all these - they had all these types from Wall Street, you know, and they had advanced degrees, and they look very alert, and they came with these - they came with these things that said gamma and alpha and sigma and all that. And all I can say is beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas. They've heard that in Europe.
I think once you start putting phony figures into financial statements, you get in a lot of trouble. And we've seen so much of that in the last 20 years.
Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, 'Too much of a good thing can be wonderful'.
I mean, if Pearl Harbor came along, you could have said the planning was wrong by the military ahead of time or maybe the battleships shouldn't have all been in the harbor and all that kind of thing.
I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year.
You get in a lot of trouble when you start putting fictitious numbers.
I would say the most satisfying thing actually is watching my three children each pick up on their own interests and work many more hours per week than most people that have jobs at trying to intelligently give away that money in fields that they particularly care about.
It's never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.
Uncertainty is the friend of the buyer of long term values.
As of 1992, in fact-though the picture would have improved since then-the money that had been made since the dawn of aviation by all of this country's airline companies was zero. Absolutely zero.
We've used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we're running a federal deficit that's 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It's more stimulative than any policy we've followed since World War II.
The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don’t have to swing at everything – you can wait for your pitch.
People do, as long as you have markets, you'll have excesses.
The obligation of a society as prosperous as ours is to figure out how nobody gets left too far behind.
Investment philosophy is the clear understanding that by owning shares of stocks he owns businesses, not pieces of paper.
We're still in a recession. We're not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.
You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. And if it can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more. And if you can’t write an intelligent answer to those questions, don’t do it.
Investing in a market where people believe in efficiency is like playing bridge with someone who has been told it doesn't do any good to look at the cards.
The American worker is more productive than he's ever been.
In the insurance business, there is no statute of limitation on stupidity.
You have hedge funds and people like that buying these assets to yield 15 or 20 percent, I mean, that's the buyer for these people that are trying to unload them.
If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.
I've read about all the sales today. If you're an auto dealer, you're feeling it. If you're a furniture retailer like we are, you're feeling it. If you're a jewelry retailer, you're feeling it. I know some of these businesses because we're in them. Yeah, it's being felt, but it will be felt big time more if we don't do something about it, what's going on.
Personally, I really hope I can treat everyone equally. I think I have done a pretty good job so far but I know I can do it better.
We need a tax system that essentially takes very good care of the people who just really aren't as well adapted to the market system but are nevertheless doing useful things in the society.
