accounting quotes

An efficient organization is one in which the accounting department knows the exact cost of every useless administrative procedure which they themselves have initiated.

- E W Steacie
Quoted byJ D Babbitt in his introduction to Steacie's Science in Canada (published posthumously,1965).

Capital accounting in its formally most rational shape†presupposes the battle of man with man.

- Max Weber
  Collected in Guenther Roth and ClausWittich (eds) Economy and Society (1978), ch.1.

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 onpaper, suchasnational budgets or industrial balance sheets.

- Simone Weil
La condition ouvrie'  re,'La rationalisation' (published1951).