Warren Buffett Quotes on Charity, Philanthropy, Inheritance

By
David
– July 15, 2011Posted in:

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.”

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