Benjamin Graham: Trending quotes

“It guarantees unfailing purchasing power where it is most needed-among the countless producers of raw commodities.”

Benjamin Graham

Source: World Commodities and World Currencies (1944), Chapter X, Commodity Unit Stabilization, p. 114
Context: We have introduced the monetary factor not by necessity but by choice. Its advantages are obvious. Self-financed commodity units are not only interest free, but free also from dependence upon credit conditions. They are a step-desirable, it seems to us-in the direction of a goods economy as distinct from a money economy; but this step is taken without violence by merely identifying basic goods with money. It guarantees unfailing purchasing power where it is most needed-among the countless producers of raw commodities.

“The State can always afford to finance what its citizens can soundly produce.”

Benjamin Graham

Part I, Chapter III, The Problem of Conserving Surplus, p. 43 (italics as per text)
Storage and Stability (1937)

“An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”

Benjamin Graham book The Intelligent Investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor

“[Shorter variant:] In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

Benjamin Graham

Quoted and attributed to Graham in Warren Buffett's 1993 letter to investors. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1993.html
The statement is not found in any of Graham's publications or lecture transcripts, and when asked, Buffett could not provide a reference. https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=77840
Disputed

“The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.”

Benjamin Graham book The Intelligent Investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 31
Context: Why could the typical investor expect any better success in trying to buy at low levels and sell at high levels than in trying to forecast what the market is going to do? Because if he does the former he acts only after the market has moved down into buying levels or up into selling levels. His role is not that of a prophet but of a businessman seizing clearly evident investment opportunities. He is not trying to be smarter than his fellow investors but simply trying to be less irrational than the mass of speculators who insist on buying after the market advances and selling after it goes down. If the market persists in behaving foolishly, all he seems to need is ordinary common sense in order to exploit its foolishness.

Intelligence

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Benjamin Graham book The Intelligent Investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor

Past

“THERE is widespread agreement among economists that abuse of credit constitutes one of the chief unwholesome elements in business booms and is mainly responsible for the ensuing crash and depression.”

Benjamin Graham

Part III, Chapter XIII, The Reservoir Plan and Credit Control, p. 153
Storage and Stability (1937)

Business

“It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.”

Benjamin Graham

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 34

Loss , Personality

“Whenever the investor sold out in an upswing as soon as the top level of the previous well-recognized bull market was reached, he had a chance in the next bear market to buy back at one third (or better) below his selling price.”

Benjamin Graham

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 35

Chance

“There is something paradoxical in the fact that by establishing an export market we subject our entire domestic production to the vagaries of that market.”

Benjamin Graham

Part IV, Chapter XIV, Farm Problems and Remedies, p. 172
Storage and Stability (1937)

“Though business conditions may change, corporations and securities may change, and financial institutions and regulations may change, human nature remains the same. Thus the important and difficult part of sound investment, which hinges upon the investor's own temperament and attitude, is not much affected by the passing years.”

Benjamin Graham

Introduction, p. xxiv
The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949)

Business , Nature , Change , Parting

“The investor would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: "Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop."”

Benjamin Graham

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 43

Reading

“The value of the security analyst to the investor depends largely on the investor's own attitude. If the investor asks the analyst the right questions, he is likely to get the right—or at least valuable— answers.”

Benjamin Graham

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter III, The Investor and His Advisers, p. 51

Question , Dependency

“Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.”

Benjamin Graham

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter III, The Investor and His Advisers, p. 48

Thinking

“The idea of storage as a solution of economic problems at least has the support of common sense. It is diametrically opposed to the topsy-turvy Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning that has marked so much of our depression thinking and policy.”

Benjamin Graham

Preface, p. vii
Storage and Stability (1937)

Idea , Support , Problem , Thinking

“The history of the past fifty years, and longer, indicates that a diversified holding of representative common stocks will prove more profitable over a stretch of years than a bond portfolio, with one important provisio—that the shares must be purchased at reasonable market levels, that is, levels that are reasonable in the light of fairly well-defined standards derived from past experience.”

Benjamin Graham

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter I, What the Intelligent Investor Can Accomplish, p. 7

History , Light , Past

“The existence of such a war chest might go far to strengthen our prestige and frighten off any would be assailant.”

Benjamin Graham

Part II, Chapter VIII, Ultimate Uses of the Stored Units, p. 97
Storage and Stability (1937)

War

“Do not let anyone else run your business.”

Benjamin Graham book The Intelligent Investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor (1973) (Fourth Revised Edition), Chapter 20, "Margin of Safety": The Central Concept, p. 286

Business

“The utility, or intrinsic value of gold as a commodity is now considerably less than in the past; its monetary status has become extraordinarily ambiguous; and its future is highly uncertain.”

Benjamin Graham

Part III, Chapter X, The Status of Gold and Silver, p. 127
Storage and Stability (1937)

Past , Future

“Good management are rarely overcompensated to an extent that makes any significant difference with respect to the stockholder's position. Poor management are always overcompensated, because they are worth less than nothing to the owners.”

Benjamin Graham

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter XIV, Stockholders and Managements, p. 209