Quotes from John C. Bogle

The rewards of my life have been great. I built a company; I left things better than I found them. I have a good reputation. I put the Vanguard shareholders and crew first. That's a huge thing.

My favourite holdings are Vanguard's Wellington Fund, a balanced mutual fund which is a legacy investment from my first career at Wellington Management Co., and the Vanguard 500 Index Fund.

My incentive in starting Vanguard, I'm very blunt about this, it was my means of preserving my career. That's a very selfish thing.

The Vanguard Experiment was designed to prove that mutual funds could operate independently, and do so in a manner that would directly benefit their shareholders.

Vanguard never would have happened if I hadn't been fired as CEO of Wellington Management Company, the firm that did the investing for the Wellington fund and eight sister funds.

It seems to me - particularly for these retirement-plan investors, the vast majority of whom are not particularly financially sophisticated - by far the best way is to invest in index funds.

Working for company X and having a substantial portion of your retirement plan in company X is simply exposing yourself to too much risk, because the company is both your employer and the source of your retirement income. So if something goes wrong, you lose both your job and your retirement plan.

The stock market is a giant distraction to the business of investing.

Reversion to the mean is the iron rule of the financial markets.

I was never the type who had a particular ambition. I had friends in college who would say, 'I want to be a vice president by the time I'm 35 years old.' A lot of people had these career plans. I didn't have any. I thought if I did my best, good things would happen.

Never underrate the importance of asset allocation.

If we wanted something, we had to earn it.

In my long experience, one thing I know is that truth is elusive.

Investing is a virtuous habit best started as early as possible.

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

On balance, the financial system subracts value from society

The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.

The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan." Stick to the good plan. Traditional

The grim irony of investing, then, is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.

When there are multiple solutions to a problem, choose the simplest one.

The most important of these rules is the first one: the eternal law of reversion to the mean (RTM) in the financial markets.

Buying funds based purely on their past performance is one of the stupidest things an investor can do.

The two greatest enemies of the equity fund investor are expenses and emotions.

The true investor . . . will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies.