If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety...
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1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, quoted in Andrew Kilpatrick, Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett (Vol. 2), p. 1615Warren Buffett
» Warren Buffett - all quotes »
It is not necessary to succeed in order to persevere. As long as there is a margin of hope, however narrow, we have no choice but to base all our actions on that margin. America and Russia have one interest in common which may override all their other interests: to be able to live with the bomb without getting into an all-out war that neither of them wants.
Leo Szilard
His face was closed like a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that.
Ayn Rand
"The camera adds ten pounds. Why? What, we don't have the technology to remedy that one little thing? We can have f**king Forrest Gump cohorting with John F. Kennedy, and we can't just fix that one little thing, the ten pound variant on a lens...You can actually levitate now when you watch a movie about flying, but they just don't have the technology for that ten pound margin of error."
Janeane Garofalo
We have already transgressed the limit of safety, and the present disorders of our time are but precursors of other and imminent dangers. The rudder of our ship has ceased to move obedient to the helm. We are drifting on the seething tide of business, each one absorbed in holding his own in the giddy race of competition, each one engrossed in immediate cares and seldom disturbed by thoughts of larger concerns and ampler interests. Even our domestic life has lost much of its former warmth and geniality.
Felix Adler
The general theory of economic equilibrium was strengthened and made effective as an organon of thought by two powerful subsidiary conceptions — the Margin and Substitution. The notion of the Margin was extended beyond Utility to describe the equilibrium point in given conditions of any economic factor which can be regarded as capable of small variations about a given value,or in its functional relation to a given value.
John Maynard Keynes
Buffett, Warren
Buffon, Gianluigi
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