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“Such a study indicates that the greatest investment reward comes to those who by good luck or good sense find the occasional company that over the years can grow in sales and profits far more than industry as a whole. It further shows that when we believe we have found such a company we had better stick with it for a long period of time. It gives us a strong hint that such companies need not necessarily be young and small. Instead, regardless of size, what really counts is a management having both a determination to attain further important growth and an ability to bring its plans to completion.”
― quote from Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
“Even in those earlier times, finding the really outstanding companies and staying with them through all the fluctuations of a gyrating market proved far more profitable to far more people than did the more colorful practice of trying to buy them cheap and sell them dear.”
― quote from Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
“Most frequently given of such reasons is the conviction that a general stock market decline of some proportion is somewhere in the offing. In the preceding chapter I tried to show that postponing an attractive purchase because of fear of what the general market might do will, over the years, prove very costly. This is because the investor is ignoring a powerful influence about which he has positive knowledge through fear of a less powerful force about which, in the present state of human knowledge, he and everyone else is largely guessing.”
― quote from Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
“In a new plant for even established processes or products, there will probably be a shake-down period of six to eight weeks that will prove rather expensive. It takes this long to get the equipment adjusted to the required operating efficiency and to weed out the inevitable "bugs" that seem to occur in breaking in modern intricate machinery.”
― quote from Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
“But his very best questions always popped out of his mind, unprepared, never having been written down in advance because they were the angle he picked up on the fly, as he heard an answer to a lesser question. Those creative questions were the art. It is what, in my mind, made his querying great.”
― quote from Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
“One, which I mention several times elsewhere, is the need for patience if big profits are to be made from investment. Put another way, it is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a stock than how much time will elapse before it happens. The other is the inherently deceptive nature of the stock market. Doing what everybody else is doing at the moment, and therefore what you have an almost irresistible urge to do, is often the wrong thing to do at all.”
― quote from Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
“Fighting unemployment by methods far more costly than the opening of bread lines and soup kitchens would not have been given serious consideration, regardless of which party might have been in office. Since 1932 all that is reversed. The Democrats may or may not be less concerned with a balanced federal budget than the Republicans. However, from President Eisenhower on down, with the possible exception of former Secretary of the Treasury Humphrey, the responsible Republican leadership has said again and again that if business should really turn down they would not hesitate to lower taxes or make whatever other deficit-producing moves were necessary to restore prosperity and eliminate unemployment. This is a far cry from the doctrines that prevailed prior to the big depression.”
― quote from Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
“It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
“How can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins?”
― Nicola Yoon, quote from The Sun Is Also a Star
“She's nothing more than a pathetic, little half-blood," the ancient woman had continued. "I say send her to the Masters. I'm in need of a little girl to clean my toilets."
Then she had twisted her fingers cruelly.
And I had kicked her shin.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, quote from Daimon
“The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from Mason & Dixon
“She had a heart the size of France, and the lucky few whom she loved with it were loved with every square inch—but its size made it dangerous, too. If she let it feel everything, she’d be wrecked. So she had to tame it, shush it, shut it up. Float the worst pains off to an island that was quickly filling with them, where she would go to live one day.”
― Ransom Riggs, quote from Library of Souls
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