Quotes About Accounting

#1. If an alien with an accounting degree touched down in America, it might conclude that we're a weird cult that spends 11 months living frugally and four crazy weeks buying tons of stuff we don't need. It wouldn't be entirely wrong, either.

Adam Davidson

#2. Dark, subtle, complex, wicked - if only Hollywood movies were half as interesting as Hollywood accounting.

Stephen Metcalf

#3. That all ended when Uncle Len was caught in the locker room of the corporate fitness center getting a blowjob from a young guy who worked in accounting.

Darien Cox

#4. The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.

P. J. O'Rourke

#5. Identity theft involving these cards is a growing form of white collar crime, facilitating illegal immigration, banking and accounting fraud, tax evasion, and other nefarious activities.

Ron Lewis

#6. But as I have resolved to set down a full account here, so I must begin with an honest accounting of myself. That morning, I was afraid.

Geraldine Brooks

#7. Attention should be paid to this question of our soul, and not simply to accounting procedures. Attention should be paid to the interest of those who are yet unborn, who should be able to see this generation as it saw itself, and the past generation as it saw itself.

George Lucas

#8. Aggressive accounting does not mean illegal accounting.

Kenneth Lay

#9. I hope for his sake that Tracy's apology will be accepted as sincere by his gay and lesbian coworkers at 30 Rock, without whom Tracy would not have lines to say, clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or a printed-out paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket.

Tina Fey

#10. Accounting incomes were reduced by discrepancy [ but] the net amount paid by lawyers for lawyerly discrepancy is close to zippo. In this case, the goddess of justice was blind.

Charlie Munger

#11. There are no accounting issues, no trading issues, no reserve issues, no previously unknown problem issues.

Kenneth Lay

#12. No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

Toni Morrison

#13. Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

#14. There is no accounting for tastes, as the woman said when someone told her her son was wanted by the police.

Franklin P. Adams

#15. Only the very ignorant are perfectly satisfied that they know. To the common man the great problems are easy. He has no trouble in accounting for the universe. He can tell you the origin and destiny of man and the why and wherefore of things.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#16. There is always something for which there is no accounting. Take, for example, the whole world.

Leonard Michaels

#17. I would argue that a majority of the horrors we face would not have happened if the accounting profession developed and enforced better accounting.

Charlie Munger

#18. Legacy accounting: Will you have been an asset or a liability on the world's balance sheet?

Ryan Lilly

#19. Now, we are seeing many of these same companies face the truth about their financial standing. Congress is faced with the challenge of reforming our accounting industry and holding corporate executives responsible for their actions.

Bennie Thompson

#20. Probably the best advice I ever got in my life was from the head of the accounting department, Mr. Hutchinson, I believe at the Glidden Company in Chicago, and he told me, 'You really aren't cut out for accounting.'

Bob Newhart

#21. It's not equality that counts, it's reprocity that counts. Love is not like a balance sheet. There's no such thing as double-entry accounting when it comes to love.

Debra Ollivier

#22. We account for one-sixth of the forces of gravity we see in the universe. There is no known objects accounting for most of the effective gravity in the universe. Something is making stuff move that is not anything we have ever touched.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#23. To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.

John F. Kennedy

#24. The SEC does way more good than harm - the last thing I would do is get rid of the SEC ... if accounting were thoroughly fixed, a lot of other sins would go away. We're paying a huge price for deterioration of accounting.

Charlie Munger

#25. Depending upon the accounting, approximately 4.3 or 17.6 percent of the plastic bags produced each year are recycled. The 4.3 number is the 2010 EPA number for plastic number 2 bags. These are what you think of as the typical grocery bag.

Michael SanClements

#26. Accounting is the language of business.

Warren Buffett

#27. Still, Amelia had not allowed herself to be certain until dessert, when she'd asked him about the book that had had the greatest influence on his life, and he'd replied Principles of Accounting, Part II.

Gabrielle Zevin

#28. Andre Tippett was an impact player who consistently played at a level that set him apart. Accounting for him limited what an offense could do. He made quarterbacks nervous.and rightly so.

Raymond Berry

#29. There's no accounting for the opinions of old ladies. They think everyone is cute.

Shannon Wiersbitzky

#30. Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed.

Barack Obama

#31. What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

R.D. Laing

#32. Hunted for sport by the rich, then driven from large tracts of its natural habitat by agricultural and housing development, the giant panda deserves better than to be scrubbed from conservation's ledger books through false accounting.

John Burnside

#33. People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.

Cormac McCarthy

#34. RICH, adj. Holding in trust and subject to an accounting the property of the indolent, the incompetent, the unthrifty, the envious and the luckless.

Ambrose Bierce

#35. Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management.

Peter Drucker

#36. History, like nature, has its own economy, its own balancing of forces in the final accounting. Nothing can be lost, except to awareness.

Helen Foster Snow

#37. But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

Michael Pollan

#38. For a hot-shot CEO taking over a troubled company, mass firings are the ultimate quick fix, the accounting equivalent of crack: cheap, easy to score, instantly gratifying, and highly addictive.

Arianna Huffington

#39. In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live."

Karen Russell

#40. Enron had already collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection by the beginning of 2002. But despite complaints from short sellers that corporations had used accounting gimmickry to inflate their profits, many investors thought the crisis at Enron was an isolated case.

Alex Berenson

#41. Some of the scientists, I believe, haven't they been changing their opinion a little bit on global warming? There's a lot of differing opinions and before we react I think it's best to have the full accounting, full understanding of what's taking place.

George W. Bush

#42. Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.

Tony Judt

#43. Over the years, Charlie [Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman] and I have observed many accounting -based frauds of staggering size. Few of the perpetrators have been punished; many have not even been censured. It has been far safer to steal large sums with pen than small sums with a gun.

Warren Buffett

#44. Beyond the fact that it is a limitless arena for the full play of human nature, there is no sure accounting for golf's fascination ... Perhaps it is nothing more than the best game man has ever devised.

Herbert Wind

#45. It is always easier to find your sense of value by demeaning another's value. It is easier to define yourself as 'not that,' rather than do an actual accounting of your own qualities and put them on the scale.

Jessa Crispin

#46. Life as we know it, with all its ups and downs, will soon be over. We all will give an accounting to God of how we have lived.

William Wilberforce

#47. You cannot write an accurate history of The Holocaust without accounting for the Harvard students and professors that help make the science an acceptable world-wide movement.

A.E. Samaan

#48. The word accounting comes from the word accountability. If you are going to be rich, you need to be accountable for your money.

Robert Kiyosaki

#49. National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S ... and the cost accounting of the Pentagon.

Louis Sullivan

#50. To be successful, you should concentrate on the world of companies, not arcane accounting mathematics.

Warren Buffett

#51. Devout Buddhists believe in sonam - an accounting of righteous deeds that, when large enough, enables one to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever this world of pain and suffering.

Jon Krakauer

#52. I know what I don't know. To this day, I don't know technology, and I don't know finance or accounting.

Bernard Ebbers

#53. It's really amazing that in the age of unbelief, as a smart man called it, there isn't even more fraud. After all, with no God, there's no one to ever call you to account, and no accounting at all if you can get away with it.

Ben Stein

#54. What is meat for one is not for another
no accounting for fancy.

Abigail Adams

#55. Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials.

Will Rogers

#56. There is no accounting for human beings.

Mark Twain

#57. Maybe it wasn't anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just ... accounting.

Iain Banks

#58. Mark-to-market accounting is like crack. Don't do it.

Andrew Fastow

#59. A full accounting of adoption as an option would not underestimate its emotional challenges - the grief and loss for birth mothers, the uncertainties for adoptive parents operating under a patchwork of state laws.

Nina Easton

#60. Managers thinking about accounting issues should never forget one of Abraham Lincoln's favorite riddles: How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg? The answer: Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Warren Buffett

#61. Forty years of emphasizing accounting-style control over things has seen American businesses do little or nothing to develop the capabilities of people. Workers have been viewed as a source of energy and cost, not as a source of ideas.

H. Thomas Johnson

#62. Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.

Simone Weil

#63. Electronic Accounting Systems processed my little payrolls like one big payroll. I did the selling, and the people I hired did most of the operations.

Tom Golisano

#64. The U.S. government uses cash accounting. That is illegal for any enterprise of any size in America except for the U.S. government. Every for-profit business, every not-for-profit business, every state and local government has to use real accounting except for Uncle Sam.

Jim Cooper

#65. When individual enterprise is free and unhampered, profit-and-loss calculations set precise limits to a businessman's temptations to expand his services ... a government valuable they may be, have no market price and, therefore, cannot be subjected to profit-and-loss accounting.

Hans F. Sennholz

#66. I don't know about technology and I don't know about finance and accounting.

Bernard Ebbers

#67. As the economist Herman Daly once put it: The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.

Bill Bryson

#68. How many married couples do you know who met over accounting books in a Starbucks?

David Schweikert

#69. In insurance, as elsewhere, the reaction of weak managements to weak operations is often weak accounting. ("It's difficult for an empty sack to stand upright.")

Warren Buffett

#70. Want an effective way of creating positive change in your life? Stop talking about what you hate, and start talking about what you love. Stop accounting for what lack, and start counting all the reasons you have to be grateful.

Karlyle Tomms

#71. I'm a good learner. I can dig in. I knew nothing about mark-to-market accounting when I started the 'Enron' film.

Alex Gibney

#72. Mathematics is less related to accounting than it is to philosophy.

Leonard Adleman

#73. The number of slave voyages included in the database has now risen to thirty-five thousand, accounting for the forced migration of more than twelve million Africans between 1514 and 1866, a million more than were estimated at the time of the conference in 1998.

Bernard Bailyn

#74. The Macau casinos have a wonderful business, it's taking in money from Chinese businessmen elsewhere who send it through junky companies to casinos to gamble. The growth continues and they have basically western managers and western accounting, so we trust the numbers a little bit more.

James Chanos

#75. Managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers are the beginning, not the end, of business valuation.

Warren Buffett

#76. I worked in accounting for two and a half years, realized that wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and decided I was just going to give comedy a try.

Bob Newhart

#77. Even something as complex as the eye has appeared several times; for example, in the squid, the vertebrates, and the arthropods. It's bad enough accounting for the origin of such things once, but the thought of producing them several times according to the modern synthetic theory makes my head swim

Frank B. Salisbury

#78. Fearlessness is an accounting trick. You feel the fear; you just defer it. I could stand on the cliff immobile, feeling terrified, or I could leap and feel the terror while falling.

Elizabeth McCracken

#79. Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like "capitalized," "deferred," and "restructuring" - and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like "began," "change," and

Benjamin Graham

#80. Between a tyrant and a prince there is this single or chief difference, that the latter obeys the law and rules the people by its dictates, accounting himself as but their servant.

John Of Salisbury

#81. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution.

Charles Sanders Peirce

#82. Today brands are everything, and all kinds of products and services - from accounting firms to sneaker makers to restaurants - are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.

Tom Peters

#83. Anyone with an engineering frame of mind will look at [accounting standards] and want to throw up.

Charlie Munger

#84. When a human being resists his whole age and stops it at the gate to demand an accounting, this must have influence.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#85. People are arguing whether Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" is anti-semitic. Well, whether it is or it isn't, it doesn't matter, because I've been in touch with his accounting firm, Rosencrantz, Levy and Stern, and they're screwing him out of his profits.

Joan Rivers

#86. I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves ... my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).

Annie Dillard

#87. Accounting rules give financial institutions flexibility about when they choose to recognize venture capital profits.

Alex Berenson

#88. Accounting for the unpaid care economy can drive progressive policies such as paid family leave, social security credits for early childcare, tax credits, and quality early childhood education.

Sri Mulyani Indrawati

#89. We have a remarkably complete picture in many ways - and it could be that we're not accounting for something that's almost three-quarters of the entire universe.

Saul Perlmutter

#90. Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.

Trevanian

#91. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.

Erich Fromm

#92. Scientific naturalism has proven incapable of accounting for a whole range of human experiences, from simple self-awareness to love.

James Carroll

#93. We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know.

Susan George

#94. I don't really care about money. I find money boring and accounting boring, so I'm probably not going to ever make a lot of money.

Juliana Hatfield

#95. At Gallaudet, deafness isn't an issue. You don't even think about it. Students can pay attention to accounting or psychology or journalism. But when a deaf person goes to another college, no matter how supportive it is, that person doesn't get the same access.

I. King Jordan

#96. Capital isn't this pile of money sitting somewhere; it's an accounting construct.

Bethany McLean

#97. Accounting is a big subject and there are huge forces in play. The entire momentum of existing thinking and existing custom is in a direction that allows terrible follies to happen, and the terrible follies have terrible consequences.

Charlie Munger

#98. By the end of 1978, we had 11 partners and six franchisees, we were operating in 22 cities, and we had about 6,000 clients. We had left Electronic Accounting Systems and were doing our own processing on our own computers.

Tom Golisano

#99. I was vaguely attracted to both library science and accounting, for the way that these disciplines impose order on chaos.

Kathleen Norris

#100. I've met them down in the Cost and Accounting Department, clean-shaven and in white collars. They can't see a damn thing ridiculous about themselves ... only about you.

Jean Shepherd