Peter Buffett Quotes

We are stronger than we think we are. We have courage that we do not recognize until we need it. We are equal to challenges that we haven't even imagined yet

Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.

The world over, give a guy money and it goes to drinking, gambling, and women. When you give a woman money, it goes to feeding, clothing, helping people.

Mistakes are very seldom permanent, most of them can be fixed with less difficulty and drama than one imagines, and there's nothing shameful about them. There is, however, something sad and limiting about the fear of making them.

There are so many people in the communities in need and so many organizations in need. People are doing amazing, beautiful things just to keep the world from not hurting more today than yesterday.

It didn't matter how big our house was; it mattered that there was love in it.

In some ways, it's easier to settle for someone else's version of success than to risk falling short at one's own.

What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it.

Power over seems to be driving our very young species into a ditch because it's from an old competitive, "there may not be enough" kind of framework of scarcity. Power with is thinking abundantly as opposed to fearfully. Power with is hopefully where we're going - and where we need to go as a species in order to survive.

Well, when people ask where I'm from, I usually say the Midwest, because that covers both homes, in a way. Obviously I was born in Omaha, but when people say, "Where do you come from," we'll say Milwaukee. I mean Jennifer was certainly born in Milwaukee, and that's where I spent a big chunk of my adult life, so we usually say we came here from Milwaukee. That's usually how it's referenced is we're from Milwaukee, yeah.

I do think men fear female intuition.

I think influence is one way to exercise power and that the challenge is whether it is power over or power with. That's the essential shift that I hope can happen in the world.

We have to be in abundance and recognize that we're just a small piece of this big thing that's moving along the biosphere, earth, evolution and consciousness and we'd better humble ourselves and start loving each other.

It's too bad that it takes egregious behavior or some kind of crisis to get people to take notice and get clearer about things that were just below the surface.

Patriarchy is connected to greed, a symptom of a larger force that can only be dispelled through kindness and love. It's basic Buddhism.

All of us were tuned in during our early development but we lose our connection to intuition over time as other things come into play.

Men can learn a lot about the importance of nurturing and being in relation to the life force versus having power over.

I've seen women essentially martyr themselves for the good of the future and the good of their children and, again, the good of love. That shouldn't be happening but it shows you the strength and power of it, and the fact that it will take over a woman's sense of her own survival. Men have taken advantage of that for hundreds and probably thousands of years.

Women have a connection to life force and nurturing. They have a connection that men don't have. It doesn't mean one's better or more important, it's just a difference.

Men at an earlier age, get the feminine aspects of them wrung out in a variety of ways.

What may be on the surface looks like one thing but it's often a much larger problem.

Shift the dynamic as much as you can, so you hear the truth from people that have lived experience. Listen intently and honor their experience.

Don't walk in with a colonial mindset and say, "We know your problem and we're going to fix it."

Our individual wholeness includes a masculine and a feminine side, which are slowly (or not so slowly) wrung out of us, depending on which gender you are.

It seems inevitable that you'd end up getting someone like Trump telling us all how important and amazing he is.

True collaborative, nurturing, and safe power is a combining of forces that can only happen on a pretty small scale.

Things today have become too big, too centralized, and too disassociated to be in relationship to each other.

We don't know where our food comes from. We don't know a lot of things about what is happening financially. This creates the "power over" kind of feeling.

Two hundred years ago, we were all busy farming and we all had a role to play. The home was a unit of production. We made food and all the things we needed, we took care of our kids and were connected to purpose in our evolution. When the Industrial Revolution came along, it took away a lot of the work the men had done.

I'm generalizing, but women, being so connected to life, tend to have stronger intuition is stronger because they are trained to be on the look-out and protect. Men do that too, but there's a different quality to women.

Suddenly, in the early 20th century, there were thousands of men with essentially nothing to do. The farm work, as well as other work, was being handled by machines.

My wife Jennifer's family is all from there. Jennifer grew up there, so we have personal ties forever - her mom, dad, her brother, her twin brother - so, there's certainly a personal connection there that will also be there. Also, even though I grew up in Omaha, I feel like I really grew up in Milwaukee.

America comes from a flawed but wonderful idea. Many great things have sprung forth over the past few hundred years but there were deep issues in the beginning that now are starting to show up.

If you can intuit well, you're essentially meeting the future faster.

I think the antidote to any symptom borne of fear and scarcity is love. Compassion, understanding, respect, honor: all the things we need to help the world heal begin there.

It's no surprise that if you look at the development of the economy, of consumerism, of all these things that have gotten out of hand over the last hundred years, it happened when men were purposeless, when they didn't actually have a legitimate reason to be moving the species forward because the machines were doing all the hard work.

Thinking that everything must be bigger to matter is a problem. Small power emanates and disseminates in a very different way.

My gut sense is there's something necessary going on and if I'm too fearful or angry, I feel like I'm feeding it.

Things like science and technology still leave some gaps, so it's not as if everybody was sitting around doing nothing, but the bureaucracy and the whole structure of our culture is basically built out of men trying to be legitimate and making things up so they look important.

The more history I read, the more everything seems to point to the same thing.

Start from the bottom up.

Try and identify where the money can go to create conditions for true systemic change.

Whatever shift is necessary is dependent on the scale on which it can be implemented, which is to say in your local community and family.

It's very powerful if you can home in on, and really trust, intuition and its strength. Most men have shunned that in so many ways that they end up squaring off the circle of life.