Gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but I think civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.
There's danger in just shoveling out money to people who say, 'My life is a little harder than it used to be.' At a certain place you've got to say to the people, 'Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.'
If any successes has come to me, it came because I insisted on thinking things through. That's all I was capable of doing in life, was thinking pretty hard about trying to get the right answer, and then acting on it. I never learned to do anything else.
Most people don't grab the right ideas or don't know what to do with them.
The perfect example of Darwinism is what technology has done to businesses.
Alternatives to gold and currency and to make a big speculative vehicle - I never considered for one second having anything to do with it. I detested it the minute it had been raised.
A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.
I've got some advice for the young: If you've got anything you really want to do, don't wait until you're 93.
Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading.
I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn't understand both is a damned fool.
You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies.
It's a real pleasure to earn the trust of your customers slowly over time by doing what's right.
Wells Fargo had a glitch - the truth of the matter is they made a business judgement that was wrong. I don't think anything is fundamentally wrong.
Economics profession, they've been - they've been confident in various formulas, but economics is not physics. The same formula that works in one decade doesn't work in the next. Economics is a difficult subject.
I love when I think we're taking territory - if it makes sense in the long term, we just don't give a damn what it looks like in the short term. After all, we're running a cult, not a normal company.
Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.
If you're glued together right and honorable, you will succeed. Get in there and get rid of stupidities and avoid bad people. Try teaching that to your grandchildren. The best way is by example. Fix yourself.
If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change.
Everyone has the idea of owning good companies. The problem is that they have high prices in relations to assets and earnings, and that takes all of the fun out of the game.
I will say this: I know no wise person who doesn't read a lot. I suspect that you can read on the computer now and get a lot of benefit out of it, but I doubt that it'll work as well as reading print worked for me.
