Quotes About Long-term

In a time when our nation is engaged in multiple, long-term wars, it's critical that "the military" not become an abstraction to the vast majority of Americans who are not participants.

You don't have to have perfect wisdom to get very rich - just a bit better than average over a long period of time.

We usually overestimate what we think we can accomplish in one year-but we grossly underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.

An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.

Cocaine habit forming? Of course not. I ought to know, I've been using it for years.

Let's assume someone puts $10,000 in a mutual fund, leaves it there 20 years, and gets an average annual return of 10 percent. If the fund had an expense ratio of 1.5 percent, the fund is worth $49,725 at the end of 20 years. However if the fund had an expense ratio of 0.5 percent, it would be worth $60,858 at the end of 20 years. Just a 1 percent difference in expenses makes an 18 percent difference in returns when compounded over 20 years.

Market timing is a poor substitute for a long-term investment plan.

It turns out that an investment of $601 at the beginning of each month in stock index funds, coupled with an average annual return of 10 percent, grows to the sum of $1,249,655 in 30 years. Incidentally, $601 a month is approximately 28.9 percent of a yearly salary of $25,000. And in case you might be wondering, yes, the math works the same for everybody.

Being a Boglehead requires planning, commitment, patience, and long-term thinking.

Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years. —Warren Buffett

Index funds outperform approximately 80 percent of all actively managed funds over long periods of time. They do so for one simple reason: rock-bottom costs. In a random market, we don't know what future returns will be. However, we do know that an investor who keeps his or her costs low will earn a higher return than one who does not. That's the indexer's edge.

Paul Farrell, columnist for CBS Marketwatch and author of The Lazy Person's Guide to Investing: "So much attention is paid to which funds are at the head of the pack today that most people lose sight of the fact that, over longer time periods, index funds beat the vast majority of their actively managed peers.

Jason Zweig, senior writer and columnist at Money magazine and coauthor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's classic, The Intelligent Investor: "If you buy-and then hold-a total stock market index fund, it is mathematically certain that you will outperform the vast majority of all other investors in the long run. Graham praised index funds as the best choice for individual investors, as does Warren Buffett.

An index fund dooms you to mediocrity? Absolutely not: It virtually guarantees you superior performance.

Shaping ideas requires long-term interaction with long-range goals and 100 percent saturation.

In Europe, you are taught to keep the ball out of the net any way possible. That's why Germany and Spain have the best goalkeepers in the world. They give young goalkeepers a chance and accept they are going to make mistakes. Long term, that will reap huge rewards.

The war against radical Salafi-Jihadism has been going on for several decades already and it will span many more and the U.S. must be preparing mentally for it.

And this speaks to the larger problem that no one wants to talk about: the restoration of the Roman rite is a precondition for a long-term fix for the problem.

In order to have a decent chance to be a communicating species, you would have to learn to think and plan and act over time scales of a century or a millennium.

I'm a big believer in investing for the long term, and the decisions you make shouldn't be made if the economy is good or bad at a specific time.

Never forget posterity when devising a policy. Never think of posterity when making a speech.

The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is ... forgetfulness.

Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Give a man a poisoned fish, you feed him for the rest of his life.

The ultimate test of a man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.