Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market.
I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.
Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.
Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.
The stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient.
Warren Buffett Quotes on Risk and Diversification
Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.
Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.
Diversification is a protection against ignorance. Diversification is not required if a person knows what they are doing.
Risk is a part of God's game, alike for men and nations.
Risk can be greatly reduced by concentrating on only a few holdings.
Warren Buffett Quotes on Charity, Philanthropy, Inheritance
If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.
[Children should be left] enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.
I don’t have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It’s like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don’t do that though. I don’t use very many of those claim checks. There’s nothing material I want very much. And I’m going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.
"I don't believe in dynastic wealth", he said, calling those who grow up in wealthy circumstances "members of the lucky sperm club."
Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise. "Equality of opportunity has been on the decline," Buffett said. "A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy."
Warren Buffett Quotes on the 2008 Global Financial Crisis
Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone's guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.
Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We'll break out of it. It takes time.
We're still in a recession. We're not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.
We've used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we're running a federal deficit that's 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It's more stimulative than any policy we've followed since World War II.
You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in 2007, we just didn't know it was uncertain. It was uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn't know it.
I am a huge bull on this country. We will not have a double-dip recession at all. I see our businesses coming back almost across the board.
I think the most important factor in getting out of the recession actually is just the regenerative capacity of American capitalism.
We live in a world of dominoes. But confidence, confidence comes back one by one.
Warren Buffett Quotes on America and the United States
It's never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.
There are 309 million people out there that are trying to improve their lot in life. And we've got a system that allows them to do it.
We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time.
In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.
Warren Buffett's Most Famous Quotes
We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.
Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
Our favorite holding period is forever.
Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.