I love the English language. Words have power.

The culture of the mutual fund industry, when I came into it in 1951, was pretty much a culture of fiduciary duty and investment, with funds run by investment professionals. The firm I worked with, Wellington Management Co., they had one fund. That was very typical in the industry... investment professionals focused on long-term investing.

Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.

I do think that impact investing is not that effective. Shares go from investor A to investor B, and the company doesn't even know it. It's inevitably an ineffective way to communicate to the company your feelings.

The best rule for philanthropy is to give until it hurts, as much as you can, because none of us can get through life all by ourselves.

The Vanguard Experiment was designed to prove that mutual funds could operate independently, and do so in a manner that would directly benefit their shareholders.

As I have said before, the daily machinations of the stock market are like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack.

Enjoy the magic of compounding returns. Even modest investments made in one's early 20s are likely to grow to staggering amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.

Nothing is simpler than owning the stock market and holding it forever, and that's essentially the idea behind the index fund.

While we would typically encourage young people to start saving for the future as early as possible, it's unlikely that a budding entrepreneur will be able to do so. The entrepreneur will need every bit of capital available for the business, which will likely crowd out personal savings.

When our financial system - essentially our money managers, marketers of investment products and stockbrokers - put up zero percent of the capital and assume zero percent of the risk yet receive fully 80% of the return, something has gone terribly wrong in our financial system.

Our financial system is driven by a giant marketing machine in which the interests of sellers directly conflict with the interests of buyers.

If the fluctuations in your investment portfolio are reduced, the impact of emotions and behavior on your account is also reduced.

Vanguard never would have happened if I hadn't been fired as CEO of Wellington Management Company, the firm that did the investing for the Wellington fund and eight sister funds.

If you were to just design the perfect retirement plan, you would own the stock market or you would own the bond market. You would get all the costs or all that you possibly could out of the system. So on an annual basis, if the market went up 8 percent, you would get 7.8 or 7.9 percent.

I liked the so-called Volcker Rule. I would have separated investment banking and commercial, deposit banking, as we did under the Glass-Steagal Act. I would have brought back Glass-Steagal.

Mutual funds with superior performance records often falter.

Have rational expectations for future returns and avoid changing those expectations in response to the ephemeral noise coming from Wall Street.

If we wanted something, we had to earn it.

I would advise someone who has just retired to be something in the broad range of 50/50 stocks and bonds.

We do some things for family reasons. If it's not consistent, well, life isn't always consistent.

It is the power of words and books - explaining and dramatizing great ideas and articulating high ideals - that is the greatest weapon in the missionary's arsenal.

I've been studying mutual funds since 1949, when I began researching my senior thesis at Princeton University.

While the interests of the business are served by the aphorism 'Don't just stand there. Do something!' the interests of investors are served by an approach that is its diametrical opposite: 'Don't do something. Just stand there!'

A fiduciary standard means, basically, put the interests of the client first. No excuses. Period.

I was never the type who had a particular ambition. I had friends in college who would say, 'I want to be a vice president by the time I'm 35 years old.' A lot of people had these career plans. I didn't have any. I thought if I did my best, good things would happen.

Investing is not nearly as difficult as it looks. Successful investing involves doing a few things right and avoiding serious mistakes.

The driving force of any profession includes not only the special knowledge, skills and standards that it demands, but the duty to serve responsibly, selflessly and wisely, and to establish an inherently ethical relationship between professionals and society.

The malfeasance and misjudgments by our corporate, financial and government leaders, declining ethical standards, and the failure of our new agency society reflect a failure of capitalism.

The rewards of my life have been great. I built a company; I left things better than I found them. I have a good reputation. I put the Vanguard shareholders and crew first. That's a huge thing.

There no longer can be any doubt that the creation of the first index mutual fund was the most successful innovation - especially for investors - in modern financial history.

When a door closes, if you look long enough and hard enough, if you're strong enough, you'll find a window that opens.

Every winter my wife and I take a week off and go to a resort in Florida.

New ideas that fly in the face of conventional wisdom of the day are always greeted with doubt and scorn, even fear.

I had done some work on index funds in my senior thesis at Princeton in 1951.

Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. It is a high-risk, high-reward proposition.

My only regret about money is that I don't have more to give away.

I think average investors should not trade a lot. The evidence is overpowering. The more you trade, the less you earn.

The grim irony of investing is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for.

In an ideal world, Adam Smith-like, individuals would recognize what they need to do in their own self-interest, and they will make changes happen and look after themselves.

If you put nothing away for retirement, I can tell you, to the last penny, how much you will have when you retire: nothing.

In investing, you get what you don't pay for. Costs matter. So intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and they will stay the course. And they won't be foolish enough to think that they can consistently outsmart the market.

Working for company X and having a substantial portion of your retirement plan in company X is simply exposing yourself to too much risk, because the company is both your employer and the source of your retirement income. So if something goes wrong, you lose both your job and your retirement plan.

Invest as efficiently as you can, using low-cost funds that can be bought and held for a lifetime.

We have moved from treating funds as investment trusts designed to serve their owner-beneficiaries to treating funds as consumer products, designed to attract the largest possible assets. This new approach has ill-served the interests of fund shareholders.

Glen Weyl is a good friend of mine.

I tend to give to those who have helped me along the road of life: Blair Academy, Princeton University, our church, and several hospitals that got me here in one piece. On the community side, I've always been a big supporter of the United Way.

I like Burton Malkiel's 'A Random Walk Down Wall Street.' He comes to the same conclusion that I do - that indexing is the way. My 'Little Book of Common Sense Investing' says pretty much the same thing.

Wise investors won't try to outsmart the market.