Warren Buffett Quotes

There is no perfect strategic decision. One always has to pay a price. One always has to balance conflicting objectives, conflicting opinions, and conflicting priorities. The best strategic decision is only an approximation - and a risk.

Whenever there's negotiations, there's things that you absolutely love, and there's things that you accept.

We… need to recalibrate our expectations for what we access as actionable intelligence. We need to lower that threshold to the appropriate level and we need to have a higher threshold tolerance for pain in the event that we miscalculate or things go wrong or people get caught or something happens.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

Our options oftentimes on foreign policy are not a choice between a good one and a bad one. It's a choice between two less-than-ideal options. And you're trying to figure out which is the least harmful of the two. And I think that's something we should be encouraged by, not something that we should be critical of.

They will not be pleased. But they know we must catch the monsoon with a well-found ship; and they know they are in the Navy--they have chosen their cake, and must lie on it.' You mean, they cannot have their bed and eat it.' No, no, it is not quite that either. I mean--I wish you would not confuse my mind, Stephen.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

In life one cannot eat his cake and have it, too; he must make his choice and then do the best he can to be content to go the way his judgment leads.

Once a decision was made, I didn't worry about it afterward.

Engineering isn't about perfect solutions; it's about doing the best you can with limited resources.

...never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.

Records don't have to be perfect.

The issue of managing through a crisis is you have to be decisive even if you don't have perfect information.

What happens if your choice is misguided, You must try to correct it But what if it’s too late? What if you can’t? Then you must find a way to live with it.

The World is perfect as it is, including my desire to change it

In life you have three options with any situation that is a challenge. Remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it.

Everything we choose in life for its lightness soon reveals its unbearable weight.

You're not perfect, but you're not your mistakes.

New York was big enough and wide enough that it allowed for reasonably eccentric people like me to thrive. It was a perfect place for me.

My kids are supposed to live till they are one hundred. You don't have to have a perfect house or a perfect relationship with your child or a perfect child, and you yourself do not have to be perfect.

You don’t choose a life, dad. You live one.

You have to take calculated risks in life.

False notes [on the piano] are human. Why does everything have to be perfect? You know, perfection itself is imperfection.

Be at peace with your choices.They all serve you.