Warren Buffett Quotes

We rarely use much debt and, when we do, we attempt to structure it on a long-term fixed rate basis. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. This conservatism has penalized our results but it is the only behavior that leaves us comfortable, considering our fiduciary obligations to policyholders, depositors, lenders and the many equity holders who have committed unusually large portions of their net worth to our care.

Berkshire's past record has been almost ridiculous. If Berkshirehad used even half the leverage of, say, Rupert Murdoch, it would be five times its current size.

Edelman maintains a very conservative balance sheet. We do small acquisitions. This helps me sleep well at night.

It takes character to sit there with all that cash and do nothing. I didn't get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.

Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.

I spend 90 percent of my time saying no, and my accountant yells at me for it, but when I started in this business, I wanted my career to have legs.

We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered.

Today, I think a CFO needs to be more of an operating CFO: someone who's using the financial data and the data of the company to help drive strategy, the allocation of capital, and the management of risks.

I have long believed the corporate world is plagued by poor capital allocation decisions.

We'll continue to take the right actions to make sure we're a profitable business.

If I were to spend investor money on nice furnishings and so forth, particularly early on, I might not have it for opportunities that can really grow our business.

One should never risk one's whole fortune unless supported by one's entire forces.

When times are bad is when you want to build! Why wait for things to pick up so everything will cost more?

The easiest way of making money is to stop losing it.

It's all about timing and taking out big shots at the right time.

Long-term sustaining growth is a minimum expectation for us.

Too many companies are running their business into the ground, I would argue, by being myopically short-term focused on the shareholder.

As a model, I look at clubs like Brighton and the success they've achieved gradually on a sustainable budget. I want to take a similar approach.

I know a few CEOs who delegate the understanding of their financials and their business metrics to the CFO, and then stop worrying about all that 'numbers stuff.' Don't do that. You have to know your numbers inside and out - they are your life blood.

I am the CEO of HCL Corporation, and, of course, a large part of my time does get spent in HCL Corporation, whether it is in actively managing our investments or perhaps even the governance and accountability and really seeing the strategic direction forward for HCL Corporation.

CEOs are also chief capital allocators. This is a point Warren Buffett has repeatedly made: that the role management plays in allocating capital across businesses and boosting returns on that capital is a critical yet poorly recognized one.

I'm not going to run my business on the basis of quarterly numbers.

When we look at our business, we are not that concerned about short term valuations.

As I looked across the company, there are three things that keep coming up that we need to work on: culture, our operating rigor, and capital allocation.

I learned if you have $100 or $100 million - if you spend more than you have, you’re going to go broke.