Balance Sheets Quotes

• Never invest in a company without understanding its finances. The biggest losses in stocks come from companies with poor balance sheets.

  Peter Lynch

  Loss, Understanding, Balance

  Peter Lynch (2012). “Beating the Street”, p.306, Simon and Schuster

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• The two most important things in any company do not appear in its balance sheet: its reputation and its people.

  Henry Ford

  Two, People, Balance

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• It sounds extraordinary, but it's a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.

  Mary Archer

  Business, Reading, Balance

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• All a company report and balance sheet can tell you is the past and the present. They cannot tell future.

  Nicolas Darvas

  Future, Past, Balance

  Nicolas Darvas (2006). “How I Made $2 Million in the Stock Market: The Darvas system for stock market profits”, p.98, Harriman House Limited

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• There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

  Henry R. Luce

  Writing, Men, Balance

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• Accounting does not make corporate earnings or balance sheets more volatile. Accounting just increases the transparency of volatility in earnings.

  Diane Garnick

  Balance, Doe, Earning

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• The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality.

  Chris Chocola

  Reality, Cash Flow, Balance

  "Entrepreneurial Minds: Clarifying your expectations". Business Week, October 26, 2014.

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• It's easier to teach a poet how to read a balance sheet than it is to teach an accountant how to write.

  Henry R. Luce

  Writing, Editing, Balance

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• A good reputation for yourself and your company is an invaluable asset not reflected in the balance sheets.

  Li Ka-shing

  Balance, Reputation, Assets

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• Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.

  Peter Drucker

  Balance, Cost, Assumption

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• Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets.

  Vince Cable

  Loss, Gambling, Years

  "The Storm ... how to survive it (and how to prevent its return)" by Vince Cable, www.theguardian.com. March 24, 2009.

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• In financing growing companies, we always looked for human value that didn't appear on the balance sheet.

  Michael Milken

  Business, Balance, Growing

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• We always look at the margin of safety in the balance sheet and then worry about the business.

  Peter Cundill

  Safety, Worry, Balance

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• A work of art expresses itself as a balance sheet pitting the spoken against the unspoken.

  Russell Sherman

  Art, Balance, Sheets

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• Evidently stockholders have forgotten more than to look at balance sheets. They have forgotten also that they are owners of a business and not merely owners of a quotation on the stock ticker. It is time, and high time, that the millions of American shareholders turned their eyes from the daily market reports long enough to give some attention to the enterprises themselves of which they are the proprietors, and which exist for their benefit and at their pleasure.

  Benjamin Graham

  Eye, Long, Giving

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• For most businesses, America is the most important asset on their balance sheet.

  Hillary Clinton

  America, Balance, Important

  Source: time.com

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• You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet

  Bill McKibben

  Healthy, Balance, Fuel

  Bill McKibben (2013). “Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist”, p.103, Macmillan

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• No one would look just at a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing. Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.

  Joseph Stiglitz

  Country, Balance, Looks

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• In most cases the favorable price performance will be accompanied by a well-defined improvement in the average earnings, in the dividend, and in the balance-sheet position. Thus in the long run the market test and the ordinary business test of a successful equity commitment tend to be largely identical.

  Benjamin Graham

  Running, Commitment, Successful

  Benjamin Graham (1959). “The Intelligent Investor: A Book of Practical Counsel”

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• A company is an organic, living, breathing thing, not just an income sheet and balance sheet. You have to lead it with that in mind.

  Carly Fiorina

  Breathing, Mind, Balance

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• ...I couldn't but surmise that the devil, looking at the cruel wars that Christianity has occasioned, the persecutions, the tortures Christian has inflicted on Christian, the unkindness, the hypocracy, the intolerance, must consider the balance sheet with complacency. And when he remembers that it has laid upon mankind the bitter burden of the sense of sin that has darkened the beauty of the starry night and cast a baleful shadow on the passing plesures of a world to be enjoyed, he must chuckle as he murmurs: give the devil his due.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Christian, War, Night

  W. Somerset Maugham (2008). “The Razor's Edge”, p.226, Random House

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• Market values are fixed only in part by balance sheets and income statements; much more by the hopes and fears of humanity; by greed, ambition, acts of God, invention, financial stress and strain, weather, discovery, fashion and numberless other causes impossible to be listed without omission.

  Gerald M. Loeb

  Fashion, Business, Stress

  Gerald M. Loeb (2007). “Battle for Investment Survival”, p.2, John Wiley & Sons

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• We rarely use much debt and, when we do, we attempt to structure it on a long-term fixed rate basis. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. This conservatism has penalized our results but it is the only behavior that leaves us comfortable, considering our fiduciary obligations to policyholders, depositors, lenders and the many equity holders who have committed unusually large portions of their net worth to our care.

  Warren Buffett

  Opportunity, Interesting, Long

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• The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other considerations and ignoring any but intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of the mind.

  Henri Bergson

  Country, Taken, Inspiration

  Henri Bergson's acceptance speech (in the form of a letter) for the Nobel Prize in literature at the Nobel Banquet at Grand Hotel in Stockholm, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1928.

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• When I started Netscape I was brand new out of college and all the aspects of building a business, like balance sheets and hiring people, were new to me.

  Marc Andreessen

  College, People, Balance

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