Quotes from Warren Buffett

If your employees, including your CEO, wish to give to their alma maters or other institutions to which they feel a personal attachment, we believe they should use their own money, not yours.

If you see somebody with even reasonable intelligence and a terrific passion for what they do and who can get people around them to march, even when those people can't see over the top of the next hill, things are gonna happen

It is not greed that drives the world but envy.

In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have worked together, we have never forgone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions.

Talking to Time Magazine a few years back, Peter Drucker got to the heart of things: "I will tell you a secret: Dealmaking beats working. Dealmaking is exciting and fun, and working is grubby. Running anything is primarily an enormous amount of grubby detail work . . . dealmaking is romantic, sexy. That's why you have deals that make no sense.

It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

If you wait till you know everything it's too late

There is no tougher job in corporate America than running an airline: Despite the huge amounts of equity capital that have been injected into it, the industry, in aggregate, has posted a net loss since its birth after Kitty Hawk. Airline managers need brains, guts, and experience—and

ABCs of business decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency.

Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.

If you can't tell whose side someone is on, they are not on yours.

To be successful, look for the job you will take if you don't need a job

If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes.

There's never just one cockroach in the kitchen.

It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.

Alas, my "fiddle playing" will not get me to Carnegie Hall — or even to a high school recital. Berkshire, on your behalf and mine, will send the Treasury $3.3 billion for tax on its 2003 income, a sum equaling 2½% of the total income tax paid by all U.S. corporations in fiscal 2003.

I like it when people say, 'Gee, that's a pretty good-looking painting.' But it's my painting, and when somebody says, 'Why don't you use more red instead of blue?' Good-bye. It's my painting. And I don't care what they sell it for. The painting itself will never be finished. That's one of the great things about it.

I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

The only time to buy these is on a day with no 'y' in it.

Charlie's dictum: "All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there.

You should never test the depth of the water with both feet.

We are suspicious of those CEOs who regularly claim they do know the future—and we become downright incredulous if they consistently reach their declared targets. Managers that always promise to "make the numbers" will at some point be tempted to make up the numbers.

From this irritating reality comes The First Law of Corporate Survival for ambitious CEOs who pile on leverage and run large and unfathomable derivatives books: Modest incompetence simply won't do; it's mindboggling screw-ups that are required.

The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.