"Our ideas are so simple, people keep asking us for mysteries, when all we have is the most elementary idea."

What this really means is: do you understand it well enough to have confidence in its future cash flows?

"We are trying to figure out what businesses are going to be worth in ten or 20 years."

"When we get into businesses where we think we can understand them reasonably well, we are trying to print the coupons out.

As we have said, in high-tech businesses or something like that, we don’t have the faintest idea what the coupons are going to be."

"When we bought See’s Candy in 1972, we had to come to the judgment as to whether we could figure out the competitive forces that would operate, the strengths and weaknesses of the company, and how that would look over a ten or 20 or 30-year period."

"Obviously, we don’t think we know [the value] to three decimal places.

But we have a high degree of confidence that we’re in the ballpark with certain kinds of businesses. The filters are designed to make sure we’re in those kinds of businesses."