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.

Eliminate emotion from your investment program.

The reality of life is, if you have a bagel shop and everybody is pouring into the doughnut shop across the street, if you want to stay in business, you start selling doughnuts.

The basic idea of retirement income is, to me, to get a check, two checks every month, one from your fixed income and one from equity account. And you want them to grow over time.

We make too much out of past performance, and it's very misleading to investors. It causes them to move money around. They buy a fund that's hot and then it turns cold as all hot funds eventually do. And then they get out. Well, buying at the high and selling at the low isn't going to leave you a satisfied shareholder, right?

The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.

The index fund always gives you the market return.

Diversification has been, and balance, like Wellington, has been so drummed into me, it's part of my personality.

U.S. companies are innovative and entrepreneurial.

Successful investing is all about common sense.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Princeton University, I took my first economics course; our textbook was the first edition of Samuelson's 'Economics: An Introductory Analysis.'

Never underrate the importance of asset allocation.

I think high turnover is definitively the investor's enemy, so you don't want to bring a high-turnover philosophy to this business. You want to have a long-term philosophy.

In my long experience, one thing I know is that truth is elusive.

The average hedge fund manager is going to earn zero per cent in extra return.

I spend about half of my time wondering why I have so much in stocks and about half wondering why I have so little.

My incentive in starting Vanguard, I'm very blunt about this, it was my means of preserving my career. That's a very selfish thing.

Investing is a virtuous habit best started as early as possible.

I built a career out of knowing what I don't know.

There is no country like the United States, with its diversified industrial base, technology leadership, innovation and strong pressure to build companies to make them grow.

My favourite holdings are Vanguard's Wellington Fund, a balanced mutual fund which is a legacy investment from my first career at Wellington Management Co., and the Vanguard 500 Index Fund.

It seems to me - particularly for these retirement-plan investors, the vast majority of whom are not particularly financially sophisticated - by far the best way is to invest in index funds.

When you're young, you've got plenty of time to recover from your mistakes.

If the job of capitalism is to create wealth for those who put up the capital, no fund group comes close to Vanguard's success in serving its owners. So we're probably as far away from communism as is realistically possible.

I've usually used the phrase 'stay the course' as one of the great rules of investment success.

What we need is congressional action to establish a federal principle of fiduciary duty - encapsulated by the phrase 'no man can serve two masters.'