Warren Buffett Quotes

Look for a job you would take if you didn’t need a job.

Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you’d be content to own it in the absence of any market.

Our performance, relatively, is likely to be better in a bear market than in a bull market ... in a year when the general market had a substantial advance, I would be well satisfied to match the advance of the averages.

For Buffett, managers are stewards of shareholder capital. The best managers think like owners in making business decisions.

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.

But then it dawned on me that the opinion of someone who is always wrong has its own special utility to decision-makers.

Since I entered the business world, conglomerates have enjoyed several periods of extreme popularity, the silliest of which occurred in the late 1960s. The drill for conglomerate CEOs then was simple: By personality, promotion or dubious accounting — and often by all three — these managers drove a fledgling conglomerate’s stock to, say, 20 times earnings and then issued shares as fast as possible to acquire another business selling at ten-or-so times earnings. They immediately applied “pooling” accounting to the acquisition, which — with not a dime’s worth of change in the underlying businesses — automatically increased per-share earnings, and used the rise as proof of managerial genius. They next explained to investors that this sort of talent justified the maintenance, or even the enhancement, of the acquirer’s p/e multiple. And, finally, they promised to endlessly repeat this procedure and thereby create ever-increasing per-share earnings.

I make no attempt to forecast the general market — my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities. However, I do believe that widespread public belief in the Inevitability of profits from investments in stocks will lead to eventual trouble. Should this occur, prices, but not intrinsic values in my opinion, of even undervalued securities can be expected to be substantially affected.

Intensity is the price of excellence.

The primary test of managerial economic performance is the achievement of a high earnings rate on equity capital employed (without undue leverage, accounting gimmickry, etc.) and not the achievement of consistent gains in earnings per share. In our view, many businesses would be better understood by their shareholder owners, as well as the general public, if managements and financial analysts modified the primary emphasis they place upon earnings per share, and upon yearly changes in that figure.

You know ... you keep doing the same things and you keep getting the same result over and over again.

I'm convinced that there is much inefficiency in the market.

Derivatives are like sex. It's not who we're sleeping with, it's who they're sleeping with that's the problem.

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

Those who attended [the annual meeting] last year saw your Chairman pitch to Ernie Banks. This encounter proved to be the titanic duel that the sports world had long awaited. After the first few pitches — which were not my best, but when have I ever thrown my best? — I fired a brushback at Ernie just to let him know who was in command. Ernie charged the mound, and I charged the plate. But a clash was avoided because we became exhausted before reaching each other.