Quotes from John C. Bogle

On balance, the financial system subracts value from society

I will create value for society, rather than extract it.

Eliminate emotion from your investment program.

Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. It is a high-risk, high-reward proposition.

Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!

The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor.

Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts, and in part on your ability to realize at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike that this too shall pass.

The basic idea of retirement income is, to me, to get a check, two checks every month, one from your fixed income and one from equity account. And you want them to grow over time.

I almost hate to say how proud I am of my career and, most of all, helping folks get the returns they deserve.

The index fund always gives you the market return.

With actively managed funds, people have big behavior problems. With funds that have done well, they put their money in, and when it has done bad, they want to take it out.

When a door closes, if you look long enough and hard enough, if you're strong enough, you'll find a window that opens.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Princeton University, I took my first economics course; our textbook was the first edition of Samuelson's 'Economics: An Introductory Analysis.'

The first step is to measure what can be easily measured. This is okay as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which cannot be measured, or give it an arbitrary quantitative value.This is artificial and misleading.The third step is to presume that what cannot be measured really is not very important.This is blindness.The fourth step is to say that what cannot be measured does not really exist. This is suicide.   I'm

The creation of Vanguard and its truly mutual (fund-shareholder-owned) structure has been the so-far-single counterexample to this pattern. I explain why this structure has worked so well, and why it must ultimately become the dominant structure in the industry.

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. Learning is to the Studious, and Riches to the Careful. If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him.

Even for taxable clients, mutual fund managers supervised the assets in very much the same way, simply ignoring the tax impact and passing the tax liability through to largely unsuspecting fund shareholders.

As a result, Keynes warned, the stock market would become "a battle of wits to anticipate the basis of conventional valuation a few months hence, rather than the prospective yield of an investment over a long term of years.

The winning formula for success in investing is owning the entire stock market through an index fund, and then doing nothing. Just stay the course.

But most short-term renters of stocks are not particularly interested in assuring that corporate governance is focused on placing the interests of the stockholder first.

But after all the horse trading between Democrats and Republicans—and reformers, bankers, and lobbyists—I fear that its complex, obtuse regulations (some 170 separate rules are still being developed) involved in limiting proprietary trading by banks makes me wish we'd taken the simple step of restoring the separation of deposit taking banks from investment banks. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 worked well until it was gradually eroded and finally repealed in 1999.

Of 1,028 stock recommendations made by the typical brokerage firm during the first quarter of 2001 (the peak if the bull market), only 7 were "sell" recommendations.

The simple fact is that selecting a mutual fund that will outpace the stock market over the long term is, using Cervantes' wonderful observation, like "looking for a needle in the haystack." So I offer you Bogle's corollary: "Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!

It is character, not numbers, that make the world go 'round.