Buffett Quotes

I think the foundation at Berkshire [Buffett's stake in Berkshirewill pass to the Buffett Foundation upon his death] will be a plus because there will be a continuation of the culture. We'd still take in fine businesses run by people who love them.

I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it's made by Warren Buffett.

I love whenever they downgrade a hurricane to a tropical depression, because I always think of a tropical depression as how I feel three songs into a Jimmy Buffett concert.

I want to have a tax on people who are making a million dollars. It's called the Buffett rule. Yes, Warren Buffett is the one who's gone out and said somebody like him should not be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. I want to have a surcharge on incomes above $5 million.

Good for Warren Buffett that he can afford to do that! Some people, sometimes, need to finance a purchase or rent a car, and a credit card becomes a necessity.

It was really phenomenal [Warren Buffett donation]. It grew out of the friendship that we had and the fact that his plan to have his wife run the foundation and give things away changed when she tragically died.

I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad. Even though there are some people who do very well, like Marc Rich-who plainly has never had any decent ethics, or seldom anyway. But in the end, Warren Buffett has done better than Marc Rich-in money-not just in reputation.

If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago.

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. And most people do not get this straight in their heads. But a fellow like Buffett does. For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles-which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, "They've invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones."

I've been associated with Warren ( Buffett) so long, I thought I'd be just a footnote.

Warren Buffett is right when he says you should invest as if the market is going to be closed for the next five years. The fundamental principles of value investing, if they make sense to you, can allow you to survive and prosper when everyone else is rudderless. We have a proven map with which to navigate. It sounds kind of crazy, but in times of turmoil in the market. I’ve felt a sort of serenity in knowing that if I’ve checked and rechecked my work, one plus one still equals two regardless of where a stock trades right after I buy it.

If there are still honest-smart men and women within those old and noble traditions, they should think carefully, observe and diagnose the illness. They should face the contradiction. Discuss the conflation. And then do as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and many others have done. Choose the miracle of creative competition over an idolatry of cash. They should stand up.

Warren Buffett once wrote that value investing is like an inoculation--it either takes or it doesn't--and when you explain to somebody what it is and how it works and why it works and show them the returns, either they get it or they don't.

Actually, I bought one share of Warren Buffett's stock, probably 35 years ago, in order to read his letters.

President Obama likes to talk about the Buffett Rule. Well, here's a Buffett Rule that all Americans should be able to support: mom and pop businesses should not pay a higher tax rate than Fortune 500 corporations like Warren Buffett's.

Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it "tap dancing to work."

Buffett’s genius was largely a genius of character—of patience, discipline, and rationality.

Buffett's methodology was straightforward, and in that sense 'simple.' It was not simple in the sense of being easy to execute. Valuing companies such as Coca-Cola took a wisdom forged by years of experience; even then, there was a highly subjective element. A Berkshire stockholder once complained that there were no more franchises like Coca-Cola left. Munger tartly rebuked him. 'Why should it be easy to do something that, if done well two or three times, will make your family rich for life?

Nobody has a bigger cult than Warren Buffett.

Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

Bill Gates recently picked up the ukulele. And Warren Buffett is a huge ukulele fan. I even got to strum a few chords with Francis Ford Coppola. It blows my mind that these people, who have everything in the world they could want, have picked up the ukulele and found a little bit of joy.

Investing in innovation, which was my broad theme talking to [Warren Buffett ], that included health vaccines, it included energy and education.

Behind every liberal philanthropist fortune is a huge capitalist score. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett can afford now to be liberal - an expensive indulgence - because in their early incarnations they were no-holds-barred capitalists who made lots of enemies conducting business without mercy and in search of pure profit.

Humanity is filled with beautiful and positive and powerful people who care. I'm so glad we have people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the world.

I give away about 50 percent of my income, so my, you know, desire to give back to the country is pretty strong and I intend to give away a lot more. I've signed the giving pledge with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, and I intend to give away the bulk of my money.

Warren Buffett pays taxes on a smaller percentage of his billions in income than his cleaning lady.

Buffett was a billionaire who drove his own car, did his own taxes, and still lived in a home he had bought in 1958 for $31,500. He seemed to answer to a deeply rooted, distinctly American mythology, in which decency and common sense triumphed over cosmopolitan guile, and in which an idealized past held firm against a rootless and too hurriedly changing present.

Buffett does enjoy being a billionaire, but in offbeat ways. As he put it, though money cannot change your health or how many people love you, it lets you be in 'more interesting environments.

I don't think Warren Buffett should be the treasurer or whatever. Warren Buffett's nuts! Just because he's a freaking billionaire doesn't mean he has common sense.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have their 'Giving Pledge,' where billionaires promise to give away the majority of their wealth when they die. My Social Security Pledge is better - to give money to good causes when you are alive. Besides, more Americans can participate.

If you took every single penny that Warren Buffett has, it'd pay for 4-1/2 days of the US government. This tax-the-rich won't work. The problem here is the government is way bigger than even the capacity of the rich to sustain it. The Buffett Rule would raise $3.2 billion a year, and take 514 years just to pay off Obama's 2011 budget deficit.

At least once a year, I meet with a group called the Giving Pledge. It's a group of billionaires - including me, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Ted Turner - who have pledged to give away most of their money to charity. We meet for three days to talk about what we're doing to help make the planet a better place to live.

Whatever happened to Warren Buffett, the world's their-richest man? Guilt, a feeling of being blessed by luck, forgotten lessons - who knows? In any case, Buffett now believe that government should redistribute the wealth earned by others to those who did not earn it.

Trying to pick individual stocks is a trap. I can't do it. Warren Buffett can, but hardly anyone else can beat the indexes over a long period of time.

We could walk 3 minutes and be on the beach. I think the music kind of suffered because of it. It kind of smelled like Jimmy Buffett, which is a bad thing.

Warren Buffett likes to say that the first rule of investing is "Don't lose money," and the second rule is, "Never forget the first rule." I too believe that avoiding loss should be the primary goal of every investor. This does not mean that investors should never incur the risk of any loss at all. Rather "don't lose money" means that over several years an investment portfolio should not be exposed to appreciable loss of principal.

Right at the core, the mainstream has it backwards. Warren Buffett often quips that the first rule of investing is to not lose money, and the second rule is to not forget the first rule. Yet few investors approach the world with such a strict standard of risk avoidance.

If P=NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in “creative leaps,” no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it's found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss; everyone who could recognize a good investment strategy would be Warren Buffett.

When asked how he became so successful in investing, Buffett answered: 'we read hundreds and hundreds of annual reports every year.

I was announcing to the public, in 2006, that I'd be leaving Microsoft in a couple of years and focusing full-time on the foundation. That was the time at which we went back to New York and Warren [Buffett] announced these gifts to a number of foundations, with a very high percentage of it going to us and basically doubling our capacity.

Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall Street of its mystery and rejoined it to Main Street -- a mythical or disappearing place, perhaps, but one that is comprehensible to the ordinary American.

We both (Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett) insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.

I've said repeatedly publicly, and other members have, that until you adjust the eligibility for entitlements, do things like raising the age for Medicare for future beneficiaries. Not for those currently receiving or those about to receive. Have serious means testing for high income people. You know Warren Buffett's always complaining about not paying enough taxes. And what I'm complaining about is we're paying for his Medicare. We ought not to be providing these kinds of benefits for millionaires and billionaires.

Take agriculture, where we haven't done much, or sanitation; saying, "okay, we will be able to make a really huge effort there." It really energized the foundation and half of what we've gotten done in this last decade is because Warren [Buffett] trusted us.

There's a clarity that comes with great ideas: You can [easily and simply] explain why something's a great business, how and why it's cheap, why it's cheap for temporary reasons and how, on a normal basis, it should be trading at a much higher level. You're never sitting there on the 40th page of your spreadsheet, as Buffett would say, agonizing over whether you should buy or not.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has hired billionaire Warren Buffett as his senior economic advisor. And not to be outdone Gary Coleman announced his senior economic adviser will be Thurston Howell the Third.

As Buffett has often observed, value investing is not a concept that can be learned and gradually applied over time. It is either absorbed and adopted at once, or it is never truly learned.

I admire people like Warren Buffett that are donating so much money to charity.

I admire leaders in science, people who really figure things out like Richard Fineman or people who work on vaccines, tons of people working on [the] HIV vaccine. There's leaders in business, people like Warren Buffett, who've got a certain approach they take that are pretty amazing. There [are] product innovators like Steve Jobs was, where he gets behind a concept and does a fantastic job.

Wal-Mart, with its legendary focus on customer value in terms of price, is innovating in sustainability. Now, we're beginning to see the mirror image, a convergence, as the not-for-profit sector is beginning to serve more effectively by applying private sector accountability and efficiencies to social needs. This reflects a rising recognition that to serve others best requires more than good intentions; it mandates a focus on real-world results. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are among the most conspicuous advocates and representatives of this transformation.