Key Quotes from 1989 Shareholder Letter

1. "A bacterium weighs only about a trillionth of a gram, its descendants, after a day of wild asexual abandon, will collectively weigh as much as a mountain... in two days, more than the sun."

2. "Some obstacle always impedes this kind of exponential growth. The bugs run out of food, or they poison each other, or they are shy about reproducing in public."

3. "Our performance to date has benefited from a double-dip: (1) the exceptional gains in intrinsic value that our portfolio companies have achieved; (2) the additional bonus we realized as the market appropriately 'corrected' the prices of these companies... We will continue to benefit from good gains in business value. But our 'catch-up' rewards have been realized."

4. "From Berkshire's present base of $4.9 billion in net worth, we will find it much more difficult to average 15% annual growth in book value than we did to average 23.8% from the $22 million we began with."

5. "Even on bad days, Charlie Munger and I do not think of Berkshire as a bacterium."

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Source: Full Letter