“The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you’re beating the market but by whether you’ve put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go.”

It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.

Rather should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.

Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.

No statement is more true and better applicable to Wall Street than the famous warning of Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the “margin of safety” – never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be – can you minimize your odds of error.

Though business conditions may change, corporations and securities may change, and financial institutions and regulations may change, human nature remains the same.

Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic.

Investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game.

By refusing to pay too much for an investment, you minimize the chances that your wealth will ever disappear or suddenly be destroyed.

If I have noticed anything over these 60 years on Wall Street, it is that people do not succeed in forecasting what`s going to happen to the stock market.

The volume of credit depends upon three factors: the desire to borrow, the ability to lend and the desire to lend.

We urge the beginner in security buying not to waste his efforts and his money in trying to beat the market. Let him study security values and initially test out his judgment on price versus value with the smallest possible sums.

The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company.

In the old legend the wise men finally boiled down the history of mortal affairs into a single phrase: ‘This too will pass.’

Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

The global crisis is caused by pathologies inherent in the global financial system itself.

Accountability for the largest financial institutions on Wall Street is the bedrock for a strong economy. Hard-working families and honest businesses cannot survive in a world where the rules don’t keep the marketplace honest.

A big part of being strong financially is that you know where you are weak and take action to make sure you don’t fall prey to the weakness. And we ALL are weak.

Financial peace isn’t the acquisition of stuff. It’s learning to live on less than you make, so you can give money back and have money to invest. You can’t win until you do this.

A lot of our respected financial institutions are just casinos in drag.

My mother said, if you don’t have the cash, don’t buy it. And on that, my mother was right.

It’s powerfully important that our kids get an education in personal finance.

Helping people doesn’t have to be an unsound financial strategy.