Bookkeeping Quotes

• Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership - it's bookkeeping

  Dee Hock

  Data, Facts, Judgment

  Dee Hock, VISA International (1999). “Birth of the Chaordic Age”, p.236, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention.

  Charlie Munger

  Business, Power, Civilization

  107 Copy quote

• Few have heard of Fra Luca Pacioli, the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping; but he has probably had much more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.

  Herbert J. Muller

  Influence, Human Life, Inventor

  Uses of the Past ch. 8 (1957)

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• To devise an information processing system capable of getting along on its own - it must handle its own problems of programming, bookkeeping, communication and coordination with its users. It must appear to its users as a single, integrated personality.

  Cliff Shaw

  Communication, Information Processing, Personality

  26 Copy quote

• Be the Mick Jagger of the mailroom, the Warren Buffet of bookkeeping and the Bono of stapler selling.

  Robin S

  Buffets, Warren Buffet, Selling

  13 Copy quote

• Yet we can be sure that whatever fictions exist in Wall Street bookkeeping, the earth is a faithful scribe, a faultless calculator, a superb bookkeeper; we will be held responsible for every bit of our economic folly.

  Thomas Berry

  Wall, Integrity, Faithful

  14 Copy quote

• Don't try to become a teacher overnight with psychological bookkeeping in your heart and educational theory in your head.

  Janusz Korczak

  Teacher, Educational, Heart

  68 Copy quote

• Economists get very uncomfortable when you talk about virtue and vice. It doesn't lend itself to a lot of columns with numbers. But I would argue that there are big virtue effects in economics. I would say that the spreading of double-entry bookkeeping by the Monk, Fra Luce de Pacioli, was a big virtue effect in economics. It made business more controllable, and it made it more honest.

  Charlie Munger

  Numbers, Vices, Arguing

  11 Copy quote

• For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Imagination, Creative

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.63, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Creative accounting is an absolute curse to a civilization. One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history's great advances. Using accounting for fraud and folly is a disgrace. In a democracy, it often takes a scandal to trigger reform. Enron was the most obvious example of a business culture gone wrong in a long, long time.

  Charlie Munger

  Enron Scandal, Civilization, Long

  46 Copy quote

• Markets are as old as the crossroads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint-stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry bookkeeping.

  Howard Rheingold

  Technology, Years, Joints

  46 Copy quote

• Capitalism designates an economic system significantly characterized by the predominance of "capital." Capitalism and double entry bookkeeping are absolutely indissociable; their relationship to each other is that of form to content.

  Werner Sombart

  Economic, Form, Capitalism

  "Der moderne Kapitalismus". Book by Werner Sombart, 2006.

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• I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Tired, Moral

  Katherine Anne Porter (2015). “Ship of Fools: A Novel”, p.337, Open Road Media

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• Art has been hijacked by nonartists. It's been taken over by bookkeeping. The whole thing is so corrupt. But I suppose that's okay. For artists, everything is grist for the mill. Artists are like cockroaches; we can't be stamped out.

  Elaine de Kooning

  Art, Taken, Cockroaches

  17 Copy quote

• (Barry) Bonds' records must remain part of baseball's history. His hits happened. Erase them and there will be discrepancies in baseball's bookkeeping about the records of the pitchers who gave them up. George Orwell said that in totalitarian societies, yesterday's weather could be changed by decree. Baseball, indeed America, is not like that. Besides, the people who care about the record book - serious fans - will know how to read it. That may be Bonds' biggest worry.

  George Will

  Baseball, Book, Weather

  7 Copy quote

• Private property works like circuitry in electronics, or piping in hydraulics. It conveys wages to the owners of labor power, as well as the various forms of nonwage property income to the owners of capital. In itself, it is no more responsible for maldistribution of purchasing power than the science of bookkeeping is responsible for bankruptcy.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Wages, Electronics

  4 Copy quote