Honesty is a very expensive gift, don't expect it from cheap people

This line is very widely credited to Warren Buffett across quote collections, business blogs, and books such as Robert Bloch's "My Warren Buffett Bible," but we could not trace it to anything Buffett actually wrote or said. It does not appear in his Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters or their definitive compilation, Lawrence Cunningham's "The Essays of Warren Buffett," nor in any reprinted speech or transcript we examined; sources that credit it invariably do so without citing an occasion, and the most specific claim we found only vaguely says he made the remark "in various interviews." The sentiment does square with Buffett's well-documented emphasis on integrity — his oft-quoted hiring test that prizes character above intelligence and energy — which likely helped the aphorism attach to his name. Some versions vary slightly in wording ("just don't expect it from cheap people"), a hallmark of an orphaned quotation passed hand to hand. We found no rival claimant and no earlier source, so we treat it as attributed to Buffett by broad consensus rather than verified.