trysail
Catch Me Who Can
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2005
- Posts
- 25,593
"For both the Acheans and Vikings, piracy was an honorable profession in the practice of which a young man acquired the advantages of a liberal education."
-Stuart Gilbert
James Joyce's Ulysses
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"There are three 'I's in every cycle. The 'innovator,' that's the first 'I.' After the innovator comes the 'imitator.' And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot. Which makes way for an innovator again."
-Warren Edward Buffett
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"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"If you don't know who you are, the stock market is an expensive place to find out."
-"Adam Smith" (nom de plume of George Gilder)
The Money Game
New York, 1967.
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"Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
-Calvin Coolidge
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- 25 minutes on the elliptical "Cross Trainer," Level 12, 3.57 miles, maximum pulse 157 (RPMs @ ~61 ) [ new P.B. 3/14/10 ]
3.67 miles { 23 minutes at Level 12 with 2-minute cool-down at Level 2 } [ new P.B. 4/7/10 ] - 15 reps lifting 100 pounds on the lat bar
- 15 reps of knee curls lifting 90 pounds
- 15 reps bench pressing 90 pounds
- 15 reps lifting 90 pounds on the lat bar
- 15 reps of knee curls lifting 90 pounds
- 15 reps bench pressing 90 pounds
- 15 overhand arm curls of 40 pounds
- 15 underhand arm curls of 40 pounds
- 25 reps of 100 pounds of overhead shoulder presses
- 1 minute of outstretched arms holding 5 pounds in each hand outstretched horizontally
- 75 crunches holding 10 pounds on chest
- 2,000 meters of rowing in 9 minutes, 30 seconds
- 5 minutes on the elliptical "Cross Trainer," alternating forward and reverse motion, Level 2, 0.60 miles
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“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
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"An immoderate compassion is like a taste for whiskey."
-Author unknown
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"So he had grown rich at last, and thought to transmit to his only son all the cut-and-dried experience which he himself had purchased at the price of his lost illusions; a noble last illusion of age."
-Honoré de Balzac
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"Good walls make good neighbors."
-Robert Frost
Mending Fences, 1914
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"Desiderata"
Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there maybe in silence. As far as possible without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And, whether it is clear to you or not, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with god, whatever you conceive him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.
-Max Ehrmann
There's an interesting story behind the correct attribution of authorship:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata
This fantastic piece of wisdom was given to me as a youth; I've never forgotten it— frequently repeating the opening line and, in times of angst, re-reading it.
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"Age and deception will always defeat youth and skill."
-Shelby Cullom Davis
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"There are millions of wildebeests on the African plain.
Not one of them will die of old age."
-Author unknown
(I managed to catch the line from the narration of an episode of PBS's Nature series; it caught my ear)
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"There are no atheists in foxholes."
-Author unknown
If you wish to take issue with Blaise Pascal's Wager, be my guest.
"If God is not, whether you lead your life piously or sinfully is immaterial. But suppose that God is. Then if you bet against the existence of God by refusing to live a life of piety and sacraments you run the risk of eternal damnation; the winner of the bet that God exists has the possibility of salvation. As salvation is clearly preferable to eternal damnation, the correct decision is to act on the basis that God is. 'Which way should we incline?' The answer was obvious to Pascal."
- Peter L. Bernstein
Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, New York, 1996.
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"In providing for the administration of the affairs of Britain, the Plantagenets followed the simple 'hungry falcon' theories laid down long before Henry's guidance by Matilda Empress— to place relatively obscure men in seats of responsibility where their ambitions, their dependence upon bounty, and their gratitude, in various combinations, could be expected to keep them vigilant and honest.
He was a 'hungry falcon' with a fanatical zeal for his king and such pride of office as only a parvenu could feel."
-Amy Kelly
Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950.
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"There are old pilots and there are bold pilots— but there are no old, bold pilots."
-A bit of aviation wisdom,
author not known.
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"Seek truth from facts."
-Mao Zedong
( formerly known as Mao Tsetung )
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"He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief."
-Francis Bacon
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Derivatives
Charlie and I are of one mind in how we feel about derivatives and the trading activities that go with them: We view them as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system.
Having delivered that thought, which I’ll get back to, let me retreat to explaining derivatives, though the explanation must be general because the word covers an extraordinarily wide range of financial contracts. Essentially, these instruments call for money to change hands at some future date, with the amount to be determined by one or more reference items, such as interest rates, stock prices or currency values. If, for example, you are either long or short an S&P 500 futures contract, you are a party to a very simple derivatives transaction – with your gain or loss derived from movements in the index. Derivatives contracts are of varying duration (running sometimes to 20 or more years) and their value is often tied to several variables.
Unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value also depends on the creditworthiness of the counterparties to them. In the meantime, though, before a contract is settled, the counterparties record profits and losses – often huge in amount – in their current earnings statements without so much as a penny changing hands.
The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). At Enron, for example, newsprint and broadband derivatives, due to be settled many years in the future, were put on the books. Or say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem – at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty.
When we purchased Gen Re, it came with General Re Securities, a derivatives dealer that Charlie and I didn’t want, judging it to be dangerous. We failed in our attempts to sell the operation, however, and are now terminating it.
But closing down a derivatives business is easier said than done. It will be a great many years before we are totally out of this operation (though we reduce our exposure daily). In fact, the reinsurance and derivatives businesses are similar: Like Hell, both are easy to enter and almost impossible to exit. In either industry, once you write a contract – which may require a large payment decades later – you are usually stuck with it. True, there are methods by which the risk can be laid off with others. But most strategies of that kind leave you with residual liability.
Another commonality of reinsurance and derivatives is that both generate reported earnings that are often wildly overstated. That’s true because today’s earnings are in a significant way based on estimates whose inaccuracy may not be exposed for many years.
Errors will usually be honest, reflecting only the human tendency to take an optimistic view of one’s commitments. But the parties to derivatives also have enormous incentives to cheat in accounting for them. Those who trade derivatives are usually paid (in whole or part) on “earnings” calculated by mark-to-market accounting. But often there is no real market (think about our contract involving twins) and “mark-to-model” is utilized. This substitution can bring on large-scale mischief. As a general rule, contracts involving multiple reference items and distant settlement dates increase the opportunities for counterparties to use fanciful assumptions. In the twins scenario, for example, the two parties to the contract might well use differing models allowing both to show substantial profits for many years. In extreme cases, mark-to-model degenerates into what I would call mark-to-myth.
Of course, both internal and outside auditors review the numbers, but that’s no easy job. For example, General Re Securities at yearend (after ten months of winding down its operation) had 14,384 contracts outstanding, involving 672 counterparties around the world. Each contract had a plus or minus value derived from one or more reference items, including some of mind-boggling complexity. Valuing a portfolio like that, expert auditors could easily and honestly have widely varying opinions.
The valuation problem is far from academic: In recent years, some huge-scale frauds and near-frauds have been facilitated by derivatives trades. In the energy and electric utility sectors, for example, companies used derivatives and trading activities to report great “earnings” – until the roof fell in when they actually tried to convert the derivatives-related receivables on their balance sheets into cash. “Mark-to-market” then turned out to be truly “mark-to-myth.”
I can assure you that the marking errors in the derivatives business have not been symmetrical. Almost invariably, they have favored either the trader who was eyeing a multi-million dollar bonus or the CEO who wanted to report impressive “earnings” (or both). The bonuses were paid, and the CEO profited from his options. Only much later did shareholders learn that the reported earnings were a sham.
Another problem about derivatives is that they can exacerbate trouble that a corporation has run into for completely unrelated reasons. This pile-on effect occurs because many derivatives contracts require that a company suffering a credit downgrade immediately supply collateral to counterparties. Imagine, then, that a company is downgraded because of general adversity and that its derivatives instantly kick in with their requirement, imposing an unexpected and enormous demand for cash collateral on the company. The need to meet this demand can then throw the company into a liquidity crisis that may, in some cases, trigger still more downgrades. It all becomes a spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown.
Derivatives also create a daisy-chain risk that is akin to the risk run by insurers or reinsurers that lay off much of their business with others. In both cases, huge receivables from many counterparties tend to build up over time. (At Gen Re Securities, we still have $6.5 billion of receivables, though we’ve been in a liquidation mode for nearly a year.) A participant may see himself as prudent, believing his large credit exposures to be diversified and therefore not dangerous. Under certain circumstances, though, an exogenous event that causes the receivable from Company A to go bad will also affect those from Companies B through Z. History teaches us that a crisis often causes problems to correlate in a manner undreamed of in more tranquil times.
In banking, the recognition of a “linkage” problem was one of the reasons for the formation of the Federal Reserve System. Before the Fed was established, the failure of weak banks would sometimes put sudden and unanticipated liquidity demands on previously-strong banks, causing them to fail in turn. The Fed now insulates the strong from the troubles of the weak. But there is no central bank assigned to the job of preventing the dominoes toppling in insurance or derivatives. In these industries, firms that are fundamentally solid can become troubled simply because of the travails of other firms further down the chain. When a “chain reaction” threat exists within an industry, it pays to minimize links of any kind. That’s how we conduct our reinsurance business, and it’s one reason we are exiting derivatives.
Many people argue that derivatives reduce systemic problems, in that participants who can’t bear certain risks are able to transfer them to stronger hands. These people believe that derivatives act to stabilize the economy, facilitate trade, and eliminate bumps for individual participants. And, on a micro level, what they say is often true. Indeed, at Berkshire, I sometimes engage in large-scale derivatives transactions in order to facilitate certain investment strategies.
Charlie and I believe, however, that the macro picture is dangerous and getting more so. Large amounts of risk, particularly credit risk, have become concentrated in the hands of relatively few derivatives dealers, who in addition trade extensively with one other. The troubles of one could quickly infect the others. On top of that, these dealers are owed huge amounts by non-dealer counterparties. Some of these counterparties, as I’ve mentioned, are linked in ways that could cause them to contemporaneously run into a problem because of a single event (such as the implosion of the telecom industry or the precipitous decline in the value of merchant power projects). Linkage, when it suddenly surfaces, can trigger serious systemic problems.
Indeed, in 1998, the leveraged and derivatives-heavy activities of a single hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, caused the Federal Reserve anxieties so severe that it hastily orchestrated a rescue effort. In later Congressional testimony, Fed officials acknowledged that, had they not intervened, the outstanding trades of LTCM – a firm unknown to the general public and employing only a few hundred people – could well have posed a serious threat to the stability of American markets. In other words, the Fed acted because its leaders were fearful of what might have happened to other financial institutions had the LTCM domino toppled. And this affair, though it paralyzed many parts of the fixed-income market for weeks, was far from a worst-case scenario.
One of the derivatives instruments that LTCM used was total-return swaps, contracts that facilitate 100% leverage in various markets, including stocks. For example, Party A to a contract, usually a bank, puts up all of the money for the purchase of a stock while Party B, without putting up any capital, agrees that at a future date it will receive any gain or pay any loss that the bank realizes.
Total-return swaps of this type make a joke of margin requirements. Beyond that, other types of derivatives severely curtail the ability of regulators to curb leverage and generally get their arms around the risk profiles of banks, insurers and other financial institutions. Similarly, even experienced investors and analysts encounter major problems in analyzing the financial condition of firms that are heavily involved with derivatives contracts. When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don’t understand how much risk the institution is running.
The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear. Knowledge of how dangerous they are has already permeated the electricity and gas businesses, in which the eruption of major troubles caused the use of derivatives to diminish dramatically. Elsewhere, however, the derivatives business continues to expand unchecked. Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts.
Charlie and I believe Berkshire should be a fortress of financial strength – for the sake of our owners, creditors, policyholders and employees. We try to be alert to any sort of megacatastrophe risk, and that posture may make us unduly apprehensive about the burgeoning quantities of long-term derivatives contracts and the massive amount of uncollateralized receivables that are growing alongside. In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal…
-Warren E. Buffett © 2003
An Excerpt from the 2002 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation
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"I’d rather lose half my shareholders, than half my shareholders’ money."
-Jean-Marie Eveillard
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"If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve."
-William Tecumseh Sherman
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"Maggiore fretta. Minore atto."
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)
(The motto appearing on the illustration of the slave Jim's coat-of-arms,
translation: "The more haste, the less speed.")
Illustration by E. W. Kemble.
(The aphorism predates Twain)
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"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more."
-Winston Spencer Churchill
A Roving Commission. Oxford, 1930.
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Education insisted on finding a moral foundation for robbery. He could hope to begin life in the character of no animal more moral than a monkey unless he could satisfy himself when and why robbery and murder were a virtue and duty. Education founded on mere self-interest was merely Guelf and Ghibelline over again— Machiavelli translated into American.
-Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams
Library of America edition, New York. 1983.
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"A simple law of economics (that can't be repealed):
Artificially low prices create shortages;
artificially high prices create surpluses.
Make health care so cheap that everybody has it: you get shortages of health care.
Pay too much for laziness: you get surpluses of laziness."
-"johnnyironboard" (an Internet chatroom nom de plume)
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"The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which make the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscious. They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit. The fact that the hypocrisy of man's group behavior... expresses itself not only in terms of self-justification but in terms of moral justification of human behavior in general, symbolizes one of the tragedies of the human spirit: its inability to conform its collective life to its individual ideals. As individuals, men believe they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command."
-Reinhold Niebuhr
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"The trouble with money is that we live in a country where it is greatly overvalued."
-H. L. Mencken
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"A schoolteacher is a man employed to tell lies to little boys."
-Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams.
Library of America edition, New York. 1983.
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"Too often, on Wall Street, the one with the money ends up with the experience and the one with the experience ends up with the money."
-Warren Edward Buffett
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"If I have seen further (than Descartes and you), it is only because I have been standing on the shoulders of Giants."
-Sir Isaac Newton
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"In medio tutissimus ibis.''
-Publius Ovidius Naso
"Ovid"
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"To get along..., go along.''
-Sam Rayburn
( Speaker of The House of Representatives, 1940-47, 1949-53, 1955-61 )
( It will surprise no one if I remark that this oft-quoted aphorism by "Mr. Sam" does not appear to me to be either wise or very good advice ).
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"But how shall we reach our long-promised homes without encountering Cape Horn? By what possibility avoid it? And though some ships have weathered it without these perils, yet by far the greater part must encounter them. Lucky it is that it comes about midway in the homeward-bound passage, so that sailors have time to prepare for it, and time to recover from it after it is astern.
But, sailor or landsman, there is some sort of Cape Horn for all. Boys! beware of it; prepare for it in time. Grey-beards! thank God it is passed. And ye lucky livers, to whom, by some rare fatality, your Cape Horns are placid as Lake Lemans, flatter not yourselves that good luck is judgement and discretion; for all the yolk in your eggs, you might have foundered and gone down, had the Spirit of the Cape said the word."
-Herman Melville
White Jacket.
Library of America edition, New York, 1983.
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"Never take the same hill twice.''
-U.S. Marine Corps maxim.
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"It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
-C. Northcote Parkinson
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"(1) The world is more complicated than most of our theories make it out to be.
(2) Ignorance is no excuse.
(3) Never decide to buy something while listening to the salesman.
(4) Most problems have either many answers or no answer. Only a few problems have a single answer.
(5) Most general statements are false, including this one.
(6) An exception TESTS a rule; it NEVER PROVES it.
(7) The moment you have worked out an answer, start checking it— it probably isn't right.
(8) If there is an opportunity to make a mistake, sooner or later the mistake will be made.
(9) Check the answer you have worked out once more— before you tell it to anybody."
-Edmund C. Berkeley
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"Persons obtaining important commands by application or political influence are apt to keep a written record of complaints and predictions of defeat, which are shown in the case of disaster. Somebody must be responsible for their failures.''
-Ulysses Simpson Grant.
Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant.
Library of America edition, New York, 1990.
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"Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.''
-Thucydides
( translation by Rex Warner )
History of The Peloponnesian War.
Penguin Classics edition, New York, 1988.
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"Ben Graham, my friend and teacher, long ago described the mental attitude toward market fluctuations that I believe to be most conducive to investment success. He said that you should imagine market quotations as coming from a remarkably accommodating fellow named Mr. Market who is your partner in a private business. Without fail, Mr. Market appears daily and names a price at which he will either buy your interest or sell you his.
Even though the business that the two of you own may have economic characteristics that are stable, Mr. Market's quotations will be anything but. For, sad to say, the poor fellow has incurable emotional problems. At times he feels euphoric and can see only the favorable factors affecting the business. When in that mood, he names a very high buy-sell price because he fears that you will snap up his interest and rob him of imminent gains. At other times he is depressed and can see nothing but trouble ahead for both the business and the world. On these occasions he will name a very low price, since he is terrified that you will unload your interest on him.
Mr. Market has another endearing characteristic: He doesn't mind being ignored. If his quotation is uninteresting to you today, he will be back with a new one tomorrow. Transactions are strictly at your option. Under these conditions, the more manic-depressive his behavior, the better for you.
But, like Cinderella at the ball, you must heed one warning or everything will turn into pumpkins and mice: Mr. Market is there to serve you, not to guide you. It is his pocketbook, not his wisdom, that you will find useful. If he shows up some day in a particularly foolish mood, you are free to either ignore him or to take advantage of him, but it will be disastrous if you fall under his influence. Indeed, if you aren't certain that you understand and can value your business far better than Mr. Market, you don't belong in the game. As they say in poker, "If you've been in the game 30 minutes and you don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy."
Ben's Mr. Market allegory may seem out-of-date in today's investment world, in which most professionals and academicians talk of efficient markets, dynamic hedging and betas. Their interest in such matters is understandable, since techniques shrouded in mystery clearly have value to the purveyor of investment advice. After all, what witch doctor has ever achieved fame and fortune by simply advising "Take two aspirins?"
The value of market esoterica to the consumer of investment advice is a different story. In my opinion, investment success will not be produced by arcane formulae, computer programs or signals flashed by the price behavior of stocks and markets. Rather an investor will succeed by coupling good business judgment with an ability to insulate his thoughts and behavior from the super-contagious emotions that swirl about the marketplace. In my own efforts to stay insulated, I have found it highly useful to keep Ben's Mr. Market concept firmly in mind.
Following Ben's teachings, Charlie and I let our marketable equities tell us by their operating results - not by their daily, or even yearly, price quotations— whether our investments are successful. The market may ignore business success for a while, but eventually will confirm it. As Ben said: "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine." The speed at which a business's success is recognized, furthermore, is not that important as long as the company's intrinsic value is increasing at a satisfactory rate. In fact, delayed recognition can be an advantage: It may give us the chance to buy more of a good thing at a bargain price.
Sometimes, of course, the market may judge a business to be more valuable than the underlying facts would indicate it is. In such a case, we will sell our holdings. Sometimes, also, we will sell a security that is fairly valued or even undervalued because we require funds for a still more undervalued investment or one we believe we understand better.
We need to emphasize, however, that we do not sell holdings just because they have appreciated or because we have held them for a long time. (Of Wall Street maxims the most foolish may be "You can't go broke taking a profit.") We are quite content to hold any security indefinitely, so long as the prospective return on equity capital of the underlying business is satisfactory, management is competent and honest, and the market does not overvalue the business...”
-Warren Edward Buffett
An excerpt from the 1987 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation.
© Warren E. Buffett, 1987.
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"It's only when the tide goes out that we find out who's been swimming naked.''
-Warren Edward Buffett
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"I think this is a case where Freddie Mac (FRE) and Fannie Mae (FNM) are fundamentally sound. They're not in danger of going under…I think they are in good shape going forward.''
—Barney Frank (D-Mass.),
House Financial Services Committee Chairman,
July 14, 2008.
( Two months later, the government forced the mortgage giants into conservatorships and pledged to invest up to $100 billion in each. )
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"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.''
-Robert A. Heinlein
"The Notebooks of Lazarus Long"
Time Enough For Love
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"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.''
-Robert A. Heinlein
"The Notebooks of Lazarus Long"
Time Enough For Love
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"Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.''
-Robert A. Heinlein
"The Notebooks of Lazarus Long"
Time Enough For Love
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"The nail that sticks out gets hammered in.''
-Japanese aphorism
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"A bureaucrat has no upside.''
-A piece of wisdom contained in a well-known aphorism.
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"He has no enemies but his friends dislike him greatly.''
-Oscar Wilde
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"Let him carry the burden of responsibility of the highest of expectations for the next 20, 30, 50 years or for the rest of his life and let me tell you, it’s a hard life.''
-Mark Spitz
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"A nightmare scenario would be created if alternative energy supplies fail to meet overly optimistic expectations, while traditional energy suppliers scale back investment due to expectations of declining demand for their products.''
-Ali al-Naimi
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"Climb high, climb far.
Your goal the sky, your aim the star.''
-Author not known
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"The selling personality is different from the analytical personality.''
-John Train
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"More instantaneous information with which to act stupidly.''
-John B. Neff
( commenting on the increased availability of real time news, the Internet and computer-driven investment analysis )
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"Judge Judy to prostitute : 'So when did you realize you were raped?'
Prostitute, wiping away tears: 'When the check bounced.' ''
-As above.
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"At the extremes, the market is not a random walk. At the extremes, the market is more likely to destroy fortunes than to create them.''
-Peter L. Bernstein
Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
New York, 1996
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"With freedom comes responsibility.''
-John W. Gardner
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"Ya gotta be careful if you don't know where you're going 'cause you might not get there.''
-Yogi Berra
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"Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.''
( In this country, it is necessary from time to time to shoot an admiral in order to encourage the others )
-Voltaire
Candide
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"Control is not leadership; management is not leadership; leadership is leadership. If you seek to lead, invest at least 50% of your time leading yourself— your own purpose, ethics, principles, motivation, conduct. Invest at least 20% leading those with authority over you and 15% leading your peers. If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates,' then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny.''
-Dee Hock
( founder and one-time CEO of VISA )
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"Why waste a perfectly good crisis?''
-Rahm Emanuel
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"Shut up and die like an aviator.''
-Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff
New York, 1979
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"In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the store, we sell hope.''
-Charles Revson
( founder of Revlon )
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"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
-H. L. Mencken
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"The whole idea behind a democracy is that the passions of the ignorant should dictate policy."
-"Rupert von Keuhnelt"
( I do not know if that is a nom de internet or the gentlemen's real name )
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"Things are in the saddle and ride mankind."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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[ written as he was flying over the Sahara ]
"It is remarkable to think that these treeless desert lands were, half a million years ago, humid tropical forest lands, with now-extinct primates and a rich diversity of plants and animals— a far cry from the impoverished biota that populates the interior of northwestern Africa today.
If the reader is wondering what happened to the rainforest, the unsurprising answer is... global climate change. It is not a new phenomenon: climate change is the rule, not the exception. And climate change was the rule long before humankind came to dominate our earth or to infuse our atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Climate change, extinction, and speciation have been acting in concert for many millenia. Past climate changes in the climate of northern Africa certainly caused local extinction pulses. These have been well documented by paleontologist Scott Wing, who has written of the Koobi Fora flora and fauna— a now vanished humid tropical world in northern Africa."
Bruce M. Beehler, Ph.D.
"Lost Worlds: Adventures In The Tropical Rainforest"
p. 201
Yale University Press
New Haven, 2008
( Dr. Beehler is vice-president of Conservation International )
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" 'I proceed to reveal,' the Colonel said. 'Listen carefully daughter. This is the Supreme Secret. Listen. Love is love and fun is fun. But it is always so quiet when the goldfish die.' "
-Ernest Hemingway
Across The River and Into The Trees
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“Girls had it better from the beginning, don’t kid yourself. They were allowed to play in the house, where the books were and the adults, and boys were sent outdoors like livestock. Boys were noisy and rough, and girls were nice, so they got to stay and we had to go. Boys ran around in the yard with toy guns going kksshh-kksshh, fighting wars for made-up reasons and arguing about who was dead, while girls stayed inside and played with dolls, creating complex family groups and learning to solve problems through negotiation and role-playing. Which gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live an adult life, would you guess? (APPLAUSE, SHOUTS) Is there any doubt about this? Is it even close?”
-Garrison Keillor
The Book of Guys
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"The only weapons she carried were the kind issued to all women."
-Guy Noir (Garrison Keillor)
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"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties."
-Sir Francis Bacon
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"...I have a theory that people who find themselves running major-league companies are real organization-management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget. They are somewhat impatient, and focused on the present. Seeing these things [ financial crises ] requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained — but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.
So it’s more or less guaranteed that every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always going to miss it. And the three or four-dozen-odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored. . . .
So we kept putting organization people — people who can influence and persuade and cajole — into top jobs that once-in-a-blue-moon take great creativity and historical insight. But they don’t have those skills."
-Jeremy Grantham
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"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know."
-Donald Rumsfeld
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"Burr was talking about justice. 'When I get to run the world,' he said comfortably to the steaming lake, 'I'm going to hold the Nuremburg Trials Part Two. I'm going to get all the arms dealers and shit scientists, and all the smooth salesmen who push the crazies one step further than they thought of going, because it's good for business, and all the politicians and the lawyers and accountants and bankers, and I'm going to put them in the dock to answer for their lives. And you know what they'll say? 'If we hadn't done it someone else would have.' And you know what I'll say? I'll say, 'Oh, I see. And if you hadn't raped the girl some other fellow would have raped her. And that's your justification for rape. Noted.' Then I'd napalm the lot of them. Fizz."
-John le Carré
The Night Manager
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"Universal suffrage can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice."
-Charles Francis Adams
North American Review, July 1869.
As quoted by T. J. Stiles in
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
New York, N.Y. 2015
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"Anyone who says you should be in 'growth' or 'value' doesn't understand investing. I cringe when I hear it; it just doesn't make any sense. Without value there is no growth. Without growth, there is no value."
-Warren E. Buffett
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