Quotes About Strategy

wishing makes dreams come true only in Disney movies; it's poison in business.

Our basic principle is that if you want to shoot rare, fast-moving elephants, you should always carry a loaded gun. p217

What's out of sight, however, should not be out of mind: Those unrecorded retained earnings are usually building value — lots of value — for Berkshire.

Leaving the question of price aside, the best business to own is one that over an extended period can employ large amounts of incremental capital at very high rates of return.

Of course, a business with terrific economics can be a bad investment if the purchase price is excessive.

One of the lessons your management has learned—and, unfortunately, sometimes re-learned—is the importance of being in businesses where tailwinds prevail rather than headwinds.

you should imagine market quotations as coming from a remarkably accommodating fellow named Mr. Market who is your partner in a private business. Without fail, Mr. Market appears daily and names a price at which he will either buy your interest or sell you his... Mr. Market has another endearing characteristic: He doesn't mind being ignored. p 209

Some Thoughts About Investing

If you invested in a low-cost index fund--where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years--you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time.

In business, I look for economic castles protected by unreachable moats.

Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy

A cumulation of small managerial stupidities will produce a major stupidity—not a major triumph.

Cash, though, is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent.

You're not an artist, you're not a scientist, you're not an intellectual. All that's left to you is politics.

The Tao advises making yourself as invisible as possible if you truly wish to be an effective leader.

Instead of thinking of anything as being unfair, you can decide what you really want, and then set about devising strategies for attaining it, independent of what anyone else in the world wants or does. The simple facts are that everyone is different, and no amount of your bitching about others having it better than you will bring about any positive self-changes.

Girls don't fight fair. They pull your hair and gauge you and pinch you; then they run off gasping to mommy when you try and defend yourself with a fist. Then you get locked into time out, and for what? No, my friend, the secret is, don't snap at the bait. Let it dangle. Swim around it. Laugh it off. After a while they've given up and try to lure someone else.

After Trump's defeat of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats need to perform an autopsy; Republicans need an exorcism.

right from the start most German generals knew that Hitler was psychotic. But as long as he was winning the war, almost all of them were happy to overlook that detail

The one thing we can all be sure about in politics is you are as well to expect the unexpected.

The essence of foreign policy, is deciding which son of a bitch to support -in 1941, Hitler or Stalin; in 1972, Brezhnev or Mao; in 1979, Somoza or Ortega. One has to choose. A blanket anti-son of a bitch policy, like a blanket anti-ethnic cleansing policy, is soothing, satisfying and empty. It is not a policy at all but righteous self-delusion.

Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.

There are things to be done. Resist retreat as a matter of strategy and principle. And provide the means to continue our dominant role in the world by keeping our economic house in order. And finally, we can follow the advice of Demosthenes when asked what was to be done about the decline of Athens. His reply? 'I will give what I believe is the fairest and truest answer: Don't do what you are doing now.

Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics.