Two weeks ago, billionaire investor Warren Buffett announced that he will give away 85% of his wealth to charity. That’s $37.4 billion in liquid stock, $31 billion of which will pass on to the hands of Bill Gates (the only person on the planet richer than he is), who along with his wife Melinda, as you know, runs the formidable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (as you might also know, Bill recently quit day-to-day operations at Microsoft in order to administrate his charitable organization full-time).

Bravo to both of these guys — fat cats with soul. Buffett, the folksy, gnomic financial figure who belongs to a previous, more upright era of money-making, has some choice quotables in this NYTimes article:

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“I’m not an enthusiast for dynastic wealth, particularly when 6 billion others have much poorer hands than we do in life.”

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“I love it when I’m around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society,” he said. “At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds.”

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Not that his children will be left empty-handed. Mr. Buffett said that the assets he is not giving to charity today will be divided up later between other philanthropic causes and his family. His children, he said, were not at all disappointed not to be receiving the lion’s share of his fortune.

“They’ve known all along my views on inherited wealth, and share them,” he said in a news conference this afternoon. “They have money that most people would dream of. They’re lucky, in that respect, when they selected their parents.”