Quotes by Warren Buffett

Making money isn’t the backbone of our guiding purpose; making money is the by-product of our guiding purpose. "If you’re doing something you love, you’re more likely to put your all into it, and that generally equates to making money.

Tom: Executive compensation. You feeling any better about it?

Warren: (LAUGHTER) Well, I-- I-- I feel fine with people making a lot of money for doing a great job. I mean, you know, the people in your field that do a great job make a lot of money. (LAUGHTER) ….

Yeah. But-- what-- what I object to is the people that the-- the biggest payday of their life is the day that they leave a company from which they failed, or-- or where they get paid automatically big sums. If you want the shot at the brass ring-- if you want a shot at making tens of millions of dollars a year, if you flop, why in the world should you be making $5 million a year, or $3 million a year? That-- it's-- pay for performance is fine, you know. Pay for showing up is not-- with the-- with the huge goodbye present, you know-- or-- or bonuses that are not tied to real performance, I think that's terrible.

Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful".

...a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.

Susie didn't get very excited when I told her we were going to get rich. She either didn't care or didn't believe me - probably both, in fact. But to the extent we did amass wealth, we were totally in sync about what to do with it - and that was to give it back to society.

In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.

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

The speed at which a business success is recognized, furthermore, is not that important as long as the company's intrinsic value is increasing at a satisfactory rate. In fact, delayed recognition can be an advantage: It may give us the chance to buy more of a good thing at a bargain price.

Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful".

Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it's not going to get the business.

Can you really explain to a fish what it's like to walk on land? One day on land is worth a thousand years of talking about it, and one day running a business has exactly the same kind of value.