Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful. |
The big question about how people behave is whether they have got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard |
Price is what you pay; value is what you get. |
Honesty is a very expensive gift, don't expect it from cheap people. |
Though practically all days are relatively uneventful, tomorrow is always uncertain. (I felt no special apprehension on December 6, 1941 or September 10, 2001.) |
At a healthy business, cash is sometimes thought of as something to be minimized - as an unproductive asset that acts as a drag on such markers as return on equity. Cash, though, is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent. |
(We) frequently get approached about acquisitions that don't come close to meeting our tests: We've found that if you advertise an interest in buying collies, a lot of people will call hoping to sell you their cocker spaniels. |
Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet. |
My successor will need one other particular strength: the ability to fight off the ABCs of business decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. When these corporate cancers metastasize, even the strongest of companies can falter. |
Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre. |