38 Quotes by Howard Warren Buffett

People love leverage when it's working. I mean, it's so easy to borrow money from a guy at X and put it out at X.

As long as you have markets, you'll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter.

Capitalism is not a perfect system. It may be better than all the other systems, but it's not a perfect system.

Beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas.

The American worker is more productive than he's ever been. We've got more people to do it. We've got all the ingredients for a sensational future. It's just that right now the athlete's on the floor. This is a super athlete.

We had the great depression, we had two world wars, we had the flu epidemic. We had oil shock. We had all these terrible things happen. But something about the American system unleashed more and of a potential to human beings over that hundred years so that we had a seven for one improvement in - there's never been any - I mean, you have centuries where if you've got a 1 percent improvement, then it's something. So we've got a great system. And we've got more productive capacity now than we ever have.

The ingredients that made this country, you know, the miracle of the world - I mean we had a seven for one improvement in the average American standard of living in the 20th century.

I mean people, people don't get ,they don't get smarter about things that get as basic as greed and you can't stand to see your neighbor getting rich. You know you're smarter than he is, and he's doing these things, you know, and he's getting rich, and your spouse is getting unhappy with you because you aren't doing pretty soon you start doing it. And so you get what I call the natural progression, the three Is. The innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.

The U.S. Treasury has got borrowing costs like nobody else has. They can borrow basically unlimited amounts. They can stay there for years and years. These assets will be worth more money over time.