Politics & Power Quote by Warren Buffett

Buffett’s move here is classic quiet bravado: he drags a century’s worth of catastrophe onto the stage, then calmly slides a single number across the table and lets it win the argument. The intent isn’t to minimize world wars or the Depression; it’s to demote them as decisive predictors of long-term market outcomes. By stacking disasters in a breathless list, he recreates the emotional weather investors actually live through - fear, scarcity, scandal, disease - and then punctures the natural conclusion (surely everything must fall apart) with a brutally simple counterfact: the Dow still compounded upward.

The subtext is a critique of our headline-driven brains. People experience history as crisis and noise, so they invest as if the next shock is unprecedented and permanent. Buffett is reminding you that “unprecedented” is the default setting of the news cycle, and “permanent” is the lie fear tells. His real target is market timing and the seductive belief that one can outsmart the macro story. The Dow’s rise functions as a proxy for American productive capacity and institutional resilience - not moral virtue, just an engine that keeps iterating through ruin.

Context matters: this is the Buffett persona at work, the Nebraska stoic selling patience as a competitive advantage. The rhetorical trick is also ethical. He doesn’t promise smooth sailing; he promises survivability. The quote is a vaccination against panic, delivered in the only language his audience fully trusts: arithmetic.