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Warren Buffett Quotes
"There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don't understand, but that doesn't cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that's what the individual investor should do."
- Warren Buffett, Morningstar Interview
"Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid."
- Warren Buffett, 1998 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
"We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely."
- Warren Buffett, 1998 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
"Time is the enemy of the poor business and the friend of the great business. If you have a business that's earning 20%-25% on equity, time is your friend. But time is your enemy if your money is in a low return business."
- Warren Buffett, 1998 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
"Ben's Mr. Market allegory may seem out-of-date in today's investment world, in which most professionals and academicians talk of efficient markets, dynamic hedging and betas. Their interest in such matters is understandable, since techniques shrouded in mystery clearly have value to the purveyor of investment advice. After all, what witch doctor has ever achieved fame and fortune by simply advising 'Take two aspirins'?"
- Warren Buffett, 1987 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
"We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet."
- Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway Owners Manual
"If you expect to be a net saver during the next 5 years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period? Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. This reaction makes no sense. Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices."
- Warren Buffett, 1997 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
"The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it."
- Warren Buffett, 1993 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
"An irrisistable footnote: in 1971, pension fund managers invested a record 122% of net funds available in equities - at full prices they couldn't buy enough of them. In 1974, after the bottom had fallen out, they committed a then record low of 21% to stocks."
- Warren Buffett, 1978 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
"I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful."
- Warren Buffett lecturing to a group of students at Columbia U. He was 21 years old.
Buffett: Don't you think Dairy Queen is more important than that?
[Warren Buffett's question to Bill Gates after Bill explained why he had the best job;
Berkshire Hathaway bought International Dairy Queen last fall, for $585 million.]
Gates: You can manage Dairy Queen, Warren. I'll go and buy the Dilly Bars.
Buffett: We'll raise the price when you come.
- Warren Buffett and Bill Gates speaking to a group of students at the University of Washington (1998)
"We have tried occasionally to buy toads at bargain prices with results that have been chronicled in past reports. Clearly our kisses fell flat. We have done well with a couple of princes - but they were princes when purchased. At least our kisses didn't turn them into toads. And, finally, we have occasionally been quite successful in purchasing fractional interests in easily-identifiable princes at toad-like prices."
- Warren Buffett, 1981 Chairman's Letters to Shareholders
"When returns on capital are ordinary, an earn-more-by-putting-up-more record is no great managerial achievement. You can get the same result personally while operating from your rocking chair. just quadruple the capital you commit to a savings account and you will quadruple your earnings. You would hardly expect hosannas for that particular accomplishment. Yet, retirement announcements regularly sing the praises of CEOs who
have, say, quadrupled earnings of their widget company during their reign - with no one examining whether this gain was attributable simply to many years of retained earnings and the workings of compound interest."
- Warren Buffett, 1985 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
"If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety..."
- Warren Buffett, 1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
"If you're an investor, you're looking on what the asset is going to do, if you're a speculator, you're commonly focusing on what the price of the object is going to do, and that's not our game."
- Warren Buffett, 1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
"A market downturn, doesn't bother us. For us and our long term investors, it is an opportunity to increase our ownership of great companies with great management at good prices. Only for short term investors and market timers is a correction not an opportunity."
- Warren Buffett
"It is our job to help our clients be fearful when others are greedy, and look at opportunities when others are fearful."
- Warren Buffett
"You pay a high price for a cheery consensus."
- Warren Buffett
"View Mr. Market as having a disorder and being in a manic depressive state and take advantage of this state of disorder." (See SEA's April 1998 newsletter for full quote.)
- Warren Buffett