Guy Spier Quotations

We think we control our environment, but in fact, it's our environment that controls us. We can't change the world. The only thing we can change is ourselves, by trying to get a better understanding of our own messed-up wiring.

Take any person, put them in the wrong environment, and they can get off to some pretty bad things. Warren Buffett has said that he would not like to get into debt because he doesn't want to discover what behavior he's capable of.

For most people, attaining the intellectual clarity and emotional detachment that investing requires is tough.

Over the time that I followed Warren Buffett, one CFO told me, it's very important to pay attention not only to what Warren Buffett says and what he actually does - often there are subtle differences between the two.

From time to time, you have seminal personalities who really change the way the world sees itself - people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. Warren Buffett is that kind of person in the business world.

I learned to see myself and my role as a capitalist... as somebody who's trying to harness, for myself and for society, the power of greed and the power of the will to acquire into something that makes the world a better place. That's the version of capitalism that we want.

When Warren Buffett says the sun shines out of somebody's backside, it's worth paying attention.

The trend of the market is up, not down. Shorting stocks puts you against that trend and thus makes it more difficult to make money.

I do not use short selling. The fund has not shorted a stock since the 2002 to 2003 time frame. At that time I did short three stocks, on which I broke even on two and made money on one of them. The experience taught me that I was not going to be using short selling going forward for a slew of reasons.

Warren Buffett has shown you can be very, very successful without being rapacious, while still being honest, without engaging in constant legal battles.

One has to divide Warren Buffet into different periods. There is a continuously evolving style of Warren Buffett.

We can’t change the world. The only thing we can change is ourselves, by trying to get a better understanding of our own messed-up wiring.

I’m trying to manage myself, not just my portfolio.

But I think it’s important to discuss just how easy it is for any of us to get caught up in things that might seem unthinkable—to get sucked into the wrong environment and make moral compromises that can tarnish us terribly. We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us. So we have to be extraordinarily careful to choose the right environment—to work with, and even socialize with, the right people. Ideally, we should stick close to people who are better than us so that we can become more like them.

The entire pursuit of value investing requires you to see where the crowd is wrong so that you can profit from their misperceptions.