In Others’ Words

I have followed a tradition of offering year-end comments, with advice and encouragement to our team as well as some musings about investments for our clients. This year, it occurred to me that I pretty much had already said or written most of what I had to say for the time being. Rather than, again, repeat myself, I decided to borrow pearls of wisdom collected from others over the years. Because some of these have been translated from different languages and others are provided from memory, I cannot guarantee the exactitude of all quotes or, sometimes, their origins. But it is the thought that counts…

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On the difficulty to acquire good judgment

Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action. (Goethe)

A great many people think they are thinking when they really are rearranging their prejudices. (Edward R. Murrow)

What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact. (Warren Buffett)

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. (John Kenneth Galbraith)

Knowledge can be communicated but not wisdom. (Herman Hesse).

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. (F.P. Jones)

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. (Jim Horning)

As for what is not true, you will always find abundance in the newspapers. (Thomas Jefferson)

Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. (Thomas Jefferson)

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data. (John Naisbitt)

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. (Mark Twain)

Coping with risk -- poorly

You cannot manage outcomes; you can only manage risk. (Peter Bernstein)

[But] Volatility does not measure risk. The whole concept of volatility is useful for people whose career is teaching, but useless to us. (Warren Buffett)

Fear is the foe of the faddist but the friend of the fundamentalist. (Warren Buffet)

The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights. (J. Paul Getty)

If venture capital involved no risk, it would be called sure-thing capital (Anonymous).

[Maybe this is why] Gentlemen prefer bonds. (Andrew Mellon)

Will we ever learn?

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)

Never mistake motion for action. (Ernest Hemingway)

[Jim Fraser advised that sometimes the best course of action is constructive inaction, i.e. intense research but little or no trading until compelling ideas are uncovered.]

Trend is not destiny. (Jim Fraser)

In every major economic downturn in U.S. history, the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom. (Peter Drucker )

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. (George Bernard Shaw)

How many pessimists end up desiring the things they fear, in order to prove that they are right? (Robert Mallet )

Beware the consensus

Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

A collection of a hundred good intellects produces collectively one idiot. (Carl Gustav Jung)

The more people who believe in something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who’s right often has to stand alone. (Soren Kierkegaard)

Investors may be quite willing to take the risk of being wrong in the company of others, while being much more reluctant to take the risk of being right alone. (John Maynard Keynes)

A good banker, alas, is not someone who anticipates danger and avoids it. It is someone who goes broke in an orthodox and conventional fashion, at the same time as all his “confrères”, in order not to be responsible for his errors. (John Maynard Keynes)

One dog barks because it sees something; a hundred dogs bark because they heard the first dog bark. (Chinese Proverb)

No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success, or get rich in business, by being a conformist. (J. Paul Getty)

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. (Oscar Wilde)

Some advice to our analysts

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. (Aaron Lowenstein)

Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts. (Albert Einstein)

Let us not mistake the detail and the accessory. (Charles de Talleyrand)

The truly great investment idea can be explained in a short paragraph. (Warren Buffet)

If you can't explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein)

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. (Albert Einstein)

Never believe anything until it has been officially denied. (Claude Cockburn)

Assets are contingent, liabilities are forever. (Jerry Manolovici)

In a high wind, even turkeys can fly. (Eugene Kleiner)

From our family office – a word about our children…

Our young like luxury, are bad mannered, mock authority and disrespect the old. (Socrates)

Money isn’t everything, but it keeps us in touch with our children. (Forgotten)

If you want to recapture your youth, just cut off his allowance. (Al Bernstein)

Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. (James Baldwin)

… And a word to our children

I am not young enough to know everything. (Oscar Wilde)

It’s a terrific advantage to have done nothing, but don’t abuse it. (Rivarol)

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. (Mark Twain)

If I don't dream I will make it, I won't even get close. (Henry J. Kaiser)

What we must decide is how we are valuable, rather than how valuable we are. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work. (Vince Lombardi)

I find that the harder I work the more luck I seem to have. (Thomas Jefferson)

Opportunity is missed by most people because it looks like work. (Thomas Edison)

Lazy people always mean to do something. (Vauvenargues)

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do. (Henry Ford)

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates. (Thomas Szasz)

To my partners threatened by success

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. (Abraham Lincoln)

A leader is a dealer in hope. (Napoleon Bonaparte)

A true leader does not need to lead. He only needs to show the way. (Henry Miller)

The leader leads, and the boss drives. (Theodore Roosevelt)

A leader knows what to do ; a manager only knows how to do it. (Ken Adelman)

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. (Samuel Johnson)

One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you. (Dennis A. Peer)

Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. (Calvin Coolidge)

The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know. (Napoleon Bonaparte)

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes. (John Ruskin)

It is very easy to get comfortable in a position of leadership, to believe that you’ve got all the answers, especially when you begin to enjoy some success... That’s one of the reasons it’s extremely difficult to stay at the top—because once you get there, it is so easy to stop listening and learning. (John Wooden)

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. (Bertrand Russell)

There’s only a razor’s edge between self-confidence and hubris. (Jack Welch)

It is always the secure who are humble. (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left. (Oscar Levant)

And to the whole Tocqueville team

The very shape of Egypt’s pyramids demonstrates that, even then, workers were already tending to work less and less. (Will Cuppy)

The only work that can be started from the top is digging a hole. (Anonymous)

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility. (Peter Drucker)

Ninety-nine percent of all failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.

(George Washington Carver)

The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. (Thomas B. Macaulay)

There is no worse waste than to do well something that did not need doing in the first place. (Peter Drucker)

In a task-centered world, processes fall between the cracks. They become slow, inflexible, error-prone, and replete with the cost of managerial overhead needed to hold them together. (Michael Hammer)

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer. (Dean Acheson)

A committee is a group of men who keep minutes and waste hours. (Milton Berle)

If a crowded desk indicates a crowded mind, what are we to think of an empty desk?

(Anonymous)

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm. (Vince Lombardi)

Best wishes of the season and Happy New Year to all,

François Sicart

December 22, 2007