Quotes from Warren Buffett

Our favorite holding period is forever.

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.

When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

The war on terrorism can never be won.

If you expect to continue to purchase stocks throughout your life, you should welcome price declines as a way to add stocks more cheaply to your portfolio.

Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball.

Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. once you're above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

Price is what you pay and value is what you get.

The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything -- you can wait for your pitch. The problem when you're a money manager is that your fans keep yelling, "Swing, you bum!"

Only buy something that you would be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for ten years.

In looking for someone to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. But the most important is integrity, because if they don't have that, the other two qualities, intelligence and energy, are going to kill you.

Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the models. Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.

You're dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it's like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can stick with Pepsi, you should be O.K.

I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that any time there's a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.

I made my first investment at age eleven. I was wasting my life up until then.

I make no attempt to forecast the general market -- my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities.

I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life–so long as you don't do too many things wrong.

A rich person should leave his kids enough to do something, but not enough to do nothing.

Buy stocks like you buy your groceries, not like you buy your perfume.

Never ask the barber if you need a haircut.

We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time.