". Berkshire's annual reports and letters to shareholders, prepared by Buffett, frequently receive coverage by the financial media. Buffett's writings are known for containing quotations from sources as ranging between the Bible and Mae West, as well as advice in a Midwestern folk style, and numerous jokes. What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end. Abhi SharmaPage 188 Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1. Never invest in a business you can't understand.I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful. The only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over. Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down. Without passion, you don't have energy. Without energy, you have nothing. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minuted to ruin it. If you think about that you'll do things differently. You never know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. Honesty is a very expensive gift, Don't expect it from cheap people. It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results. Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. Abhi SharmaPage 189 Wall Street is the only place that people drive to in a Rolls Royce to take advice from people who ride the subway. Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing. The fact that people will be full of greed, fear or folly is predictable.The sequence is not predictable. When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact. I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows. I like to go for cinches. I like to shoot fish in a barrel. But I like to do it after the water has run out. In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield. The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth. There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult. Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre. Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians. I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me. I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years. Abhi SharmaPage 190 Will Rogers Never miss a good chance to shut up. Will Rogers was first an Indian, a cowboy and a national figure. Born in 1879 on a large ranch in the Cherokee Nation near what later would become Oologah, Oklahoma, Will Rogers was taught by a freed slave how to use a lasso as a tool to work Texas Longhorn cattle on the family ranch. As he grew older, Will Rogers' roping skills developed so special that he was listed in the Guinness Book of Records for throwing three lassos at once: One rope caught the running horse's neck, the other would hoop around the rider and the third swooped up under the horse to loop all four legs. Will Rogers' unsurpassed lariat feats were recorded in the classic movie,"