Buffett said it aloud, answering a student’s question about how he weighs investment risk during a 1993 visit to Columbia Business School. Herald staff writer Jim Rasmussen printed the remark in the Omaha World-Herald of 2 January 1994 — the earliest citation Quote Investigator ↗ locates, and the evidence on which it credits Buffett.
“Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing” Warren Buffett, answering students at Columbia Business School, 1993; first printed by Jim Rasmussen, Omaha World-Herald, 2 January 1994. Verified at quotle.info
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Evoking the world of Warren Buffett — American investor & chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Theme: "Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
Where the line was first printed
Spoken
Columbia Business School, New York, 1993
Article
Billionaire Talks Strategy With Students
Reporter
Jim Rasmussen, Omaha World-Herald
First published
2 January 1994, Business section, p. 17S
Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.
The sentence closes a longer answer about the Washington Post Company as an investment Buffett considered exceptionally safe in the early 1970s: honest, capable managers with their own net worth in the business, bought far below what it was worth. Certainty, in his telling, is what removes risk — so risk is what is left when you do not understand the thing you have bought. Quote Investigator ↗ reproduces the surrounding passage from the newspaper.
1993 — Buffett returns to his own graduate school, Columbia Business School, and takes questions from students for most of an afternoon. The Buffett newsletter Kingswell ↗ dates the visit to 27 October 1993 and notes that the Omaha World-Herald is the only known record of the conversation.
2 January 1994 — Herald staff writer Jim Rasmussen publishes lengthy excerpts under the headline “Billionaire Talks Strategy With Students,” page 17S. Quote Investigator ↗ gives this as its earliest citation and credits Buffett on its strength.
1994 — Robert G. Hagstrom’s The Warren Buffett Way (J. Wiley, 1994 ↗) carries the line to a mass investing audience. QI notes the book’s quoted block was taken from the newspaper piece but compressed, with phrases that were not originally adjacent.
1998 onward — the line re-circulates without a source: a Reuters roundup carried by the Des Moines Sunday Register of 8 February 1998 prints it, still with the contraction, per Quote Investigator ↗. The de-contracted wording shows up later, in a Forbes column of 28 March 2016. Today Wikiquote ↗ still files the line under quotes from the press, citing a 2014 Forbes column rather than the 1994 original.
Buffett spoke the line in 1993 and its first documented publication is Rasmussen’s report of 2 January 1994 — far too recent for the US public domain, where the cutoff in 2026 is first publication before 1931. The words remain Buffett’s and the printed transcription the newspaper’s; the eight-word sentence appears here as a short attributed excerpt for the purpose of verifying its source.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Real quote, unreliable paper trail
This one is not a fabrication — Buffett said it. What goes wrong is everything downstream of the saying: the sentence travels with no source at all, in two wordings, and is regularly pinned to the wrong Buffett document.
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WordingThe compressed book version Mis-worded
Hagstrom’s The Warren Buffett Way (1994) presents phrases that were not originally adjacent as continuous speech — two quoted runs joined by “he says.” Quote Investigator ↗ notes the text was taken from the newspaper piece but compressed, and that some of the phrases were not originally side by side in Buffett’s answer.
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WordingThe de-contracted variant Variant
A Forbes column of 28 March 2016 ran it as “Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing,” dropping the contraction — documented by Quote Investigator ↗, whose earlier citations all keep it. Both forms circulate today.
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SourceThe 1993 shareholder letter Wrong source
The line is often placed in Buffett’s 1993 letter to Berkshire shareholders, which does argue at length about what risk really means and dismisses the academic beta measure. But the letter itself ↗ does not contain this sentence.
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SourceQuotation databases No source
BrainyQuote ↗ gives the line with no date, work or occasion, and Goodreads ↗ carries it with the site’s own notice that community-added quotes are unverified. The 1994 newspaper citation appears on neither.
✓The sentence is genuinely Buffett’s: spoken to Columbia Business School students in 1993 and first printed by Jim Rasmussen in the Omaha World-Herald of 2 January 1994, the earliest citation found by Quote Investigator ↗.
Context
An argument about what risk actually is
The remark is a jab, and it has a target. By the early 1990s finance had settled on a tidy statistical definition of risk: how much a share price bounces around relative to the market, the quantity called beta. Buffett thought that measured the wrong thing entirely. In his 1993 letter to Berkshire shareholders ↗ he defined risk plainly as the possibility of loss or injury, and argued the real question is whether an investor ends up with at least the purchasing power he started with, plus a modest return — dismissing the beta approach as producing absurdities.
Asked at Columbia the same year how he sized up risk, he answered with a concrete case rather than a theory: a business he understood, run by honest and capable people with their own money in it, bought well below what it was worth. Nothing about that felt risky to him. The eight words that followed compress the whole argument — risk is not a property of the asset, it is a property of the buyer’s ignorance.
Risk is not a property of the asset. It is a property of the buyer.
Why Columbia was a pointed place to say it
Buffett went to Columbia Business School for graduate study because Benjamin Graham taught there, after Harvard Business School turned him down. Graham’s value investing — buy below intrinsic worth, in a business you can actually assess — is exactly the framework the answer applies, delivered back in Graham’s own lecture halls.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Born 1930 · American investor & chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
Warren Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on 30 August 1930. Rejected by Harvard Business School, he went to Columbia Business School specifically to study under Benjamin Graham, whose value investing — buy a business you understand for less than it is worth — became the spine of his own method. He built Berkshire Hathaway into one of the largest companies in the world and remains its chairman; his annual shareholder letters are read as much for their plain-spoken argument as for their numbers, which is precisely why offhand remarks like this one harden into adages.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this page
Jim Rasmussen, "Billionaire Talks Strategy With Students: Columbia University Group Hears From Famous Alumnus Berkshire Hathaway," Omaha World-Herald, January 2, 1994, Business sec., 17S. Earliest citation identified in Quote Investigator, "Quote Origin: Risk Comes from Not Knowing What You're Doing," March 18, 2018.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing’?” Last verified 6 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/risk-comes-from-not-knowing-what-youre-doing/