Finance and Accounting Quotes
Top 20 Finance and Accounting Quotes
No 1 (Best quote!)
Profit is not a cause. It is the result – the result of performance of the business in marketing, innovation and
productivity.
- Peter Drucker, pictured right, The Practice of Management (1954)
No 2
It is the customer who pays the wages.
- Henry Ford (1863–1947), American car manufacturer,
pictured right.
No 3
Money…is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and
easy.
- David Hume (1711–76), Scottish
philosopher, pictured right.
No 4
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts
- from a sign hanging in the office of the German-born American scientist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), pictured right.
No 5
Expenditure rises to meet income.
- C. Northcote Parkinson (1909–93),English writer, pictured right.
No 6
A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.
- John Ruskin (1819-1900), English writer and
philosopher, pictured right.
No 7
Accounting...never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures that look well on paper.
- Simone Weil (1909-43), French philosopher, pictured right.
No 8
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; for loan oft loses both itself and friend
(Polonius in Hamlet)
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616),
English playwright, pictured right.
No 9
Would any of you think of building a tower without first sitting down and calculating the cost, to see whether
he could afford to finish it?,
(Luke 14:28 in the Bible)
- Jesus (speaking to his disciples),
founder of Christianity.
No 10
The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.
(tenant farmers in the 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath)
- John Steinbeck (1920-68), American writer, pictured right
No 11
It is as I see it the
strategic aim of a business to earn a return on capital.
- Alfred Sloan (1875-1966), American boss of General Motors 1923-46,
pictured right,.
No 12
There must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), American
president, pictured right.
No 13
If the people understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before
morning,
- Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) American
president, pictured right.
No 14
Management accounting systems can and should be designed to support the operations and the strategy of the
organization.
- Robert Kaplan, pictured right, and
Thomas Johnson, pictured right below, in Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (1987)
No 15
Accountants and market researchers may be brilliant at examining and analyzing facts about the past, but they
have no forward vision.
- Terence Conran (1931-), English
designer, pictured right.
Lord Justice Harman (1894-1970), the English judge (pictured right), also comments
Accountants are the witch-doctors of the modern world and willing to turn their hands to any kind of magic.
No 16
My father was fond of saying you need three things in life: a good doctor, a forgiving priest and a clever
accountant.
- Oskar Schindler (in the 1993 film, Schindler's List, pictured right)
No 17
The budget process was invented by an alien race of sadistic beings who resemble large cats.
- Scott Adams, pictured right, The Dilbert Principle (1996) .
No 18
Controls follow strategy.
- Peter Drucker, pictured right, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities,
Practices (1973).
No 19
A company must not only get to the future first, it must get there for less.
- Gary Hamel, pictured right above, and
CK Prahalad, pictured right below, Competing for the Future (1996)
No 20
A company’s most precious asset is its relationships with its customers.
- Theodore (Ted) Levitt, pictured right, The Marketing Imagination (1983)
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