quotes by Investor Quotes

“Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. The person sitting in the shade now should be grateful for the person who planted and tended that tree. That includes all those benefactors of humanity throughout history that created, invented, financed, produced, maintained and improved all that we enjoy today.”

“If we start deciding, based on guesses or emotions, whether we will or won't participate in a business where we should have some long run edge, we're in trouble.”

“Microsoft Research has a thing called the Sense Cam that, as you walk around, it's taking photos all the time. And the software will filter and find the ones that are interesting without having to think, 'Let's get out the camera and get that shot.' You just have that, and software helps you pick what you want.”

“The day I was born songs were on records, phones were tied down, computers needed rooms and the web was fiction. Change the world. You can.”

“That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be.”

“My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”

“Investing is forgoing consumption now in order to have the ability to consume more at a later date.”

“I have made the mistaken assumption - and I will attempt to be better at this - of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season. And that is my mistake.”

“You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.”

“America should stand for more than just wealth.”

“The more you learn, the more you have a framework that the knowledge fits into.”

“I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.”

“In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.”

“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.”

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

“Consciously paying more for a stock than its calculated value - in the hope that it can soon be sold for a still-higher price - should be labelled speculation”

“We try to exert a Ted Williams kind of discipline. In his book The Science of Hitting, Ted explains that he carved the strike zone into 77 cells, each the size of a baseball. Swinging only at balls in his "best" cell, he knew, would allow him to bat .400; reaching for balls in his "worst" spot, the low outside corner of the strike zone, would reduce him to .230. In other words, waiting for the fat pitch would mean a trip to the Hall of Fame; swinging indiscriminately would mean a ticket to the minors.”

“Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.”

“Philanthropy, although it's tiny compared to the government, it's 2% of the US economy, which is the largest percentage, other than the Middle East.”

“I started SpaceX with the expectation of failure.”

“Do what you would do for free, having passion for what you do is the most important thing.”

“If at first you do succeed, quit trying on investing.”

“Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.”

“We win because we hire the smartest people. We improve our products based on feedback, until they're the best. We have retreats each year where we think about where the world is heading.”

“I'm not a macroeconomics person.”

“When I take a look at a company's annual report, if I don't understand it, they don't want me to understand it.”

“I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.”

“You get what I call the natural progression, the three Is. The innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.”

“Two years from now, spam will be solved.”

“Anyway, the US, as in most issues, is the best, has the best capability to lead, and really needs to lead. It doesn't [mean] that other countries won't pick different tacks and emphasize different things. In aggregate, they're almost half of the energy R&D. Europe, China, Japan - it's very important that they come along and contribute to these things.”

“Even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.”

“You pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus.”

“Bridge is the king of all card games.”

“When you have a fortune that is almost hard to imagine, the best thing is not to pass that on to one's children. That distorts their life situation.”

“I can't promise results, but I can promise a common destiny.”

“That's my job - to make sure everything is great.”

“I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.”

“Software is more important than hardware.”

“The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.”

“When you have feelings like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial life.”

“It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”

“Fortunately for India, it has got a growing economy. If it is doing the right things with taxation and focusing on the right areas for human development, it is going to have no problem, over a period of time, taking care of its own needs.”

“If you're afraid of failing you won't get very far”

“Strategy is figuring out what not to do.”

“I really like my life. I've arranged my life so that I can do what I want.”

“I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.”

“I know what I want to do and it makes sense to get going.”

“The Noah rule: Predicting rain doesn't count; building arks does.”

“We've demonstrated a strong track record of being very disciplined with the use of our cash. We don't let it burn a hole in our pocket, we don't allow it to motivate us to do stupid acquisitions. And so I think that we'd like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future.”

“Never lie under any circumstances.”