"How my profession can tolerate such fiction and look the public in the eye is beyond my understanding. I suppose the answer lies in the fact that if your living depends on playing poker, you can easily develop a poker face. My profession appears to regard a set of financial statements as a roulette wheel to the public investor-- and it is his tough luck if he doesn't understand the risks that we inject into the accounting reports."

--Leonard Spacek, senior partner and former chairman emeritus of Arthur Andersen, LLP (circa 1970)

"We talked about events since the last edition of Security Analysis. Benjamin Graham had an idea he wanted to talk to me about: a new edition of The Intelligent Investor was forthcoming, that book being more or less a distillation of the textbook, Security Analysis, only for the layman. Graham wanted me to work on it, more or less by long distance correspondence with him. I could send the relevant chapters to Aix-en-Provence or Majorca or La Jolla, and he would send them back again.

'There are really only two people I would want to work on this,' Graham said. 'You're one, and the other is Warren Buffett.'

'Who's Warren Buffett?' I asked."