Warren Buffett Quotes

I think that as the market moves and costs get higher and fares get higher, it always creates opportunity. That's been the cycle over the years.

Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others that are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.

When I broke in, in 1957, it was wide open. Now you're up against strong competition.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Today, the competition is considerably more intense.

The competition is pretty rough these days.

If you start a successful company in China at 11 A.M., by 2 P.M. there's three more companies like it.

You have got to shoot, otherwise you can't score.

The key to making acquisitions is being ready because you really never know when the right big one is going to come along.

There's only so much you can do, but if somebody doesn't give you a chance there is nothing you can do.

Chance is the one thing you can't buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

If I have nothing to sacrifice, I have nothing to gain.

If you wait for the right time or the good times to start a business, you wait all your life.

Every day, you get up, and the world is changing; your customers are expecting more from you. Your competitors are putting pressure on you by doing more and trying to beat you here and beat you there.

The enterprise market is never winner-take-all.

When a market isn't in transition, gaining market share is hard - you're fighting to take one or two points of share from competitors.

In the years that I've been in this business, a lot of things have changed in a major way. In all aspects.

Many first-time founders fail to understand the difference between the potential of the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and the very finite subsection they can hope to capture. No company ever captures the entire market they pioneer. Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum, and others will jump in from the moment you've identified the potential.

I wasn't given a scholarship out of high school, and that allowed me to learn what hard work was early on.

We have been told many times that we have become too big, but these are things that only someone who has no idea of the size of the competition can say. We are too small.

Twenty five years in business, including business with other nations, competing with companies across the world, has given me an understanding of what it is that makes America a good place to grow and add jobs, and why jobs leave America - why businesses decide to locate here, and why they decide to locate somewhere else.

The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can only eat about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products - CDs, say, or shoes - there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year - 1 percent being the annual growth rate of American population. The problem is that [the industry] won't tolerate such an anemic rate of growth.

For me, businesses are like buses. You stand on a corner and you don't like where the first bus is going? Wait ten minutes and take another. Don't like that one? They'll just keep coming. There's no end to buses or businesses.

The world has changed a great deal from when I began 50 years ago. I was very fortunate. There were a lot of opportunities that perhaps don't exist today.