[I]t is very important to examine what the limits of an accounting system are—to know what the numbers and quantities... really mean.

People are accustomed to thinking of accounting as dry and boring, a necessary evil used primarily to prepare financial reports and survive audits, but that is because accounting is something that has become taken for granted.

Accounting numbers, of course, are the language of business and as such are of enormous help to anyone evaluating the worth of a business and tracking its progress. Charlie and I would be lost without these numbers: they invariably are the starting point for us in evaluating our own businesses and those of others. Managers and owners need to remember, however, that accounting is but an aid to business thinking, never a substitute for it.

I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web. Sometimes I think that’s why I like accounting. All day, you are only dealing with numbers. You add them, multiply them, and if you are careful, you will always have a solution. There’s a sequence there. An order. With numbers, you can have control….

Accounting is possibly the most confusing, boring subject in the world, but if you want to be rich long-term, it could be the most important subject.

took to the business like a porpoise to the sea. Augustine Paspalakis, unfortunately, did not share Lisa’s affinity for the finer points of bookkeeping. He once told his daughter, “What I know about money is I take some in and I put in the safe. In the morning I take the money out of the safe and I put it in the bank.” Steno was a man who could add up any column of figures in his head, but start talking debits and ledgers with him and his eyes would glaze over. To him accounting meant you had to turn

It's simply to say that managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers is the beginning, not the end, of business valuation.

The accountants' job is to record, not to evaluate. The evaluation job falls to investors and managers.
Accounting numbers, of course, are the language of business and are of enormous help to anyone evaluating the worth of a business and tracking its progress. Charlie and I would be lost without these numbers: they invariably are the starting point for us in evaluating our own businesses and those of others. Managers and owners need to remember, however, that accounting is but an aid to business thinking, never a substitute for it. p198

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.

Moral: To understand economics you need to know not only fundamentals but also its nuances. Darwin is in the nuances. When someone preaches “Economics in one lesson,” I advise: Go back for the second lesson.

[can’t recall using GAAP except] probably in Accounting 101 at Wharton

Before we can apply the tools of anthropology to reconstruct the real history of money, we need to understand what's wrong with the conventional account.

After all, one must have some grasp of logic even to recognize a non sequitur.

To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.