Berkshire Hathaway, Inc.'s (NYSE: BRK.A) famous leader Warren Buffett and his second-in-command Charlie Munger spoke at length to reporters this last weekend at the the company's annual shareholder meeting, below are some of the highlights as reported by Money Magazine's Jason Zweig:

In response to a question from Barbara Kiviat of Time on how he and Munger control their emotions, Buffett replied: "[It] comes about from having an investment philosophy grounded in the idea that a stock is a piece of a business. If you look at it that way, there's no reason to get excited whether some analyst is recommending it or the company is splitting the shares two-for-one, or whatever. The only way to drive the extraneous thoughts out of your mind is to have a philosophy. And for us that philosophy comes from Benjamin Graham and The Intelligent Investor, especially chapters 8 and 20. It's not very complicated stuff."

"You have to have the right temperament. I tell the students who come visit me that if you have more than 120 or 130 I.Q. points, you can afford to give the rest away. You don't need extraordinary intelligence to succeed as an investor. You need a philosophy and the ability to think independently...It doesn't make any difference what other people think of a stock. What matters is whether you know enough to evaluate the business," he opined.

"You should be able to write down on a yellow sheet of paper, 'I'm buying General Motors at $22, and GM has [566] million shares for a total market value of $13 billion, and GM is worth a lot more than $13 billion because _______________." And if you can't finish that sentence, then you don't buy the stock. [Note: Buffett mentioned GM for illustrative purposes only.] All this requires some temperamental detachment from other people's behavior. Both Charlie and I have a natural instinct in that direction. We value our opinions more than others' -- perhaps to an extreme!"

Kiviat followed up by asking whether they mind being regarded as "a bastion of calm" by others. Buffett simply stated, "I think they're probably right," while Munger was more loquacious: "Not only are they right, but it's a huge advantage to us to get the reputation of being wiser and stronger than other places. Would any of you object to being considered wiser and stronger when you're trying to get anything in life? The key is not to be seduced by crazy ideas, but instead just stick to the fundamentals year after year. Academia doesn't get too interested in us -- we're too simple. What would the professors do? A great many of the formulas [they use to analyze securities and markets] are dead wrong. They exist purely to give the intellectual class something to do. We don't do anything just exercise our intellectual proclivity for mathematical formulas."

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