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Warren Buffett: 292 quotes24 likes

“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…”

Warren Buffett

1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, as quoted in Of Permanent Value : The Story of Warren Buffett, by Andrew Kilpatrick, Vol. 2 (2007), p. 1615

“Look for integrity, intelligence and energy.”

Warren Buffett

Rules for success

“Success in investing doesn't correlate with I. Q. once you're above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”

Warren Buffett

As quoted in Homespun Wisdom from the "Oracle of Omaha" by Amy Stone in BusinessWeek (5 June 1999) http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_27/b3636006.htm

“Just because Charlie and I can clearly see dramatic growth ahead for an industry does not mean we can judge what its profit margins and returns on capital will be as a host of competitors battle for supremacy. At Berkshire we will stick with businesses whose profit picture for decades to come seems reasonably predictable. Even then, we will make plenty of mistakes.”

Warren Buffett

1994 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1994.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“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).”

Warren Buffett

1998 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1998pdf.pdf Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“If I was running $1 million today, or $10 million for that matter, I'd be fully invested. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return I've ever achieved were in the 1950s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. It's a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that.”

Warren Buffett

As quoted in "Wisdom from the 'Oracle of Omaha'" by Amy Stone in BusinessWeek (5 June 1999)

“Management's objective is to achieve a return on capital over the long term which averages somewhat higher than that of American industry generally — while utilizing sound accounting and debt policies.”

Warren Buffett

29 March 1974
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“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.”

Warren Buffett

1997 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1997.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“There's a whole bunch of things I don't know a thing about — I just stay away from those. So, I stay within what I call my circle of competence.”

Warren Buffett

Rules for success

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.”

Warren Buffett

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239763 "10 Brilliant Quotes From Warren Buffett, America's Second-Richest Person " entrepreneur.com (13 November 2014)
Quotes from the press

“Love is the greatest advantage a parent can give.”

Warren Buffett

As quoted in "Should You Leave It All to the Children?" by Richard I. Kirkland Jr, in Fortune (29 September 1986) http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1986/09/29/68098/index.htm

“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.”

Warren Buffett

1992 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1992.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“Size seems to make many organizations slow-thinking, resistant to change and smug.”

Warren Buffett

2006 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2006ltr.pdf Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“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. In stating this opinion, we define risk, using dictionary terms, as "the possibility of loss or injury."”

Warren Buffett

1993 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1993.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“People will always try to stop you doing the right thing if it is unconventional.”

Warren Buffett

As quoted in "My $650,100 Lunch with Warren Buffett" by Guy Spier, in TIME (30 June 2008) http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1819293,00.html

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

Warren Buffett

Though Buffet is reported to have expressed such ideas with such remarks many times in his lectures, he never claimed to originate the idea, and in the article "The Chains of Habit Are Too Light To Be Felt Until They Are Too Heavy To Be Broken" at the Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/warren-buffett/ it is shown that this sort of expression about chains goes back at least to similar ideas presented by Samuel Johnson in "The Vision of Theodore, The Hermit of Teneriffe, Found in His Cell" in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 18 (April 1748), p.160: It was the peculiar artifice of Habit not to suffer her power to be felt at first. Those whom she led, she had the address of appearing only to attend, but was continually doubling her chains upon her companions; which were so slender in themselves, and so silently fastened, that while the attention was engaged by other objects, they were not easily perceived. Each link grew tighter as it had been longer worn, and when, by continual additions, they became so heavy as to be felt, they were very frequently too strong to be broken. Such sentiments were later succinctly summarized by Maria Edgeworth in Moral Tales For Young People by Miss Edgeworth (1806), Vol 1, Second Edition, p. 86: … the diminutive chains of habit, as somebody says, are scarcely ever heavy enough to be felt, till they are too strong to be broken. Disputed

“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.”

Warren Buffett

1985 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1985.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“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.”

Warren Buffett

As quoted in Barbarians at the Gate : The Fall of RJR Nabisco (1989), by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar

“I've reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the portfolio after my death — abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term "thinking outside the box."”

Warren Buffett

2007 Chairman's Letter
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

“Buy a business, don’t rent stocks.”

Warren Buffett