Quotes About Earnings

“I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom.
Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.”

— Calvin Coolidge

“The inclination to consider UPenn, not attendance at UPenn, is the key to future earnings.”

— Frank Bruni

“I was really into communal living and we were all /
such free spirits, crossing the country we were /
nomads and artists and no one ever stopped / to think about how the one working class housemate / was whoring to support a gang of upper middle class / deadheads with trust fund safety nets and connecticut / childhoods, everyone was too busy processing their isms / to deal with non-issues like class ... and it's just so cool / how none of them have hang-ups about / sex work they're all real / open-minded real / revolutionary you know / the legal definition of pimp is / one who lives off the earnings of / a prostitute, one or five or / eight and i'd love to stay and / eat some of the stir fry i've been cooking / for y'all but i've got to go fuck / this guy so we can all get stoned and / go for smoothies tomorrow, save me / some rice, ok?”

— Michelle Tea

“The term bellwether refers to the practice of placing a bell around the neck of a castrated ram (a wether) leading his flock of sheep. While out of sight, the sound of the bell is a directive on the whereabouts of the flock. When earning season begins, the bellwether stock is that of the largest (typically industrial) companies who report their earnings. Analysts look to these reports as an indication of how subsequent reports will come in under or over expectations.”

— Coreen T. Sol

“Each man should have all he earns, whether by brain or body; and the director, the great industrial leader, is one of the greatest of earners, and should have a proportional reward; but no man should live on the earnings of another, and there should not be too gross inequality between service and reward.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied ... and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“To encourage more top-caliber students to choose teaching, teachers should be paid a lot more, with starting salaries more in the range of $60,000 and potential earnings of as much as $150,000.”

— Arne Duncan

“Poverty drove their parents to have them castrated as young children, hoping they would earn a better living at court. Usually the father would take the boy to a specialist castrator, who operated by the appointment of the court. After a contract was signed, absolving the castrator from any responsibility in case of death or failure (both highly likely outcomes), the unimaginably painful operation was performed. The castrator's fee was huge and had to be paid from future earnings.”

— Jung Chang

“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your earnings for what does not satisfy? Hearken diligently to Me, and eat what is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness [the profuseness of spiritual joy].”

— Anonymous.

“In the Eisenhower era, when earnings over $400,000 were subject to 91 percent taxes and the world was a smaller place, you could count the truly wealthy on one hand: Getty, Dupont, Mellon, Rockefeller, though even those fortunes were being dispersed to children as the old robber barons died off.”

— Michael Shnayerson

“Cerner has significant growth opportunities. We believe there is leverage with HNA Millennium and in our business model that can grow both our top-line and earnings during 2000 and through the foreseeable part of this decade.”

— Neal Patterson

“I was offered a choice of a flat salary up front or a percentage of the film's future earnings. I took the up front money. Nobody could have figured what Halloween would ultimately become.”

— Donald Pleasence

“Investors have been too willing to buy stocks with strong reported earnings, even if they do not understand how the earnings are produced.”

— Alex Berenson

“I'd rather donate 10% of my earnings to homeless people on the street than to an organization that sells negativity that I'll never defeat.”

— Stanley Victor Paskavich

“If expectations of lifetime earnings drop, then so will spending.”

— Amity Shlaes

“To know whether stocks are cheap or pricey, we typically look at price-to-earnings ratio. Valuation is a tougher question than many folks realize.”

— Barry Ritholtz

“Once we break out of the framework of national states as unified entities with no internal divisions within them, we can see that there is a global shift of power, but it's from the global workforce to the owners of the world: transnational capital, global financial institutions. So, for example, the earnings of working people as a percentage of national income has by and large declined in the last couple of decades, but apparently it's declined in China more than in most places. There is certainly economic growth in China and India. Hundreds of millions of people live a lot better than they did before, but then there are hundreds of millions more who don't. In fact, it's getting worse for them in many ways.”

— Noam Chomsky

“Think how weird profit margins are: We've got high unemployment and financial crises - and world record profit margins. People think the American market is very cheap. We don't. The market quite incorrectly gives full credit to today's earnings.”

— Jeremy Grantham

“Only 74 percent of professional women will rejoin the workforce in any capacity, and only 40 percent will return to full-time jobs [after taking time out of the workforce to raise children]. Those who rejoin will often see their earnings decrease dramatically.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

“We invest in undervalued companies that exhibit strong fundamentals, above-market dividend yields and historic earnings growth, which our analysis indicates will persist. Our strategy is to own strong, fundamentally sound companies and to avoid speculative stocks or potential bankruptcies.”

— David Dreman

“Annual earnings in the fast-food industry are well below the income needed for self-sufficiency, and fast-food industry jobs are also much less likely than other jobs to provide health benefits.”

— David Rolf

“Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”

— Alan Greenspan

“Women still average much less in earnings over a lifetime than men do and have to pay back the same college debt.”

— Gloria Steinem

“The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.”

— Edward Dahlberg

“When I was about 17, I had a row with my mother and left home for six months, renting a flat and working as a waitress for a while. I learnt you could double your earnings if you gave good, cheerful service. It taught me that in any job you can improve your lot.”

— Anne Robinson

“Gold cometh gladly and in increasing quantity to any man who will put by not less than one-tenth of his earnings to create an estate for his future and that of his family.”

— George S. Clason

“Instead of rising rapidly in the beginning and flattening out later, the earnings curves of most those who eventually become millionaires was the reverse; their income increased slowly, if at all, for many years. And then after two to three decades, it suddenly went through the roof.”

— Srully Blotnick

“After a year of transformation Foster's Group sits at the doorstep of a period of sustained strong earnings growth.”

— Trevor O'Hoy

“Life is full of uncertainties. Future investment earnings and interest and inflation rates are not known to anybody. However, I can guarantee you one thing.. those who put an investment program in place will have a lot more money when they come to retire than those who never get around to it.”

— Noel Whittaker

“If drugs were legalized in the US, the Mexican economy would collapse since the earnings from drugs bring in more hard currency than its largest licit source, oil sales. Mexico is a corrupt state that has now become dependent on the earnings on an illegal product. But inevitably, the product will become legal and then Mexico will retain its corruption but must face the needs of its citizens now employed by the drug industry who have become steeped in violence and conditioned to higher incomes.”

— Charles Bowden

“One has to know more about a company if one buys earnings.”

— Walter Schloss

“The way that Wall Street works is most people like very steady quarterly earnings, and they like to be very popular instead of unpopular and they don't like to be the nail that sticks up, as they say.”

— Christopher Galvin

“American democracy is a chess-game in which pawns imagine themselves to be free individuals with wills of their own: that delusion is one of the rules of the game, without which the game could not continue. I doubt anyone, no matter how sharp and sharp-tongued, could succeed in getting across to high school students how vital an acute mind is for just keeping a grip on one's life and earnings in our mendacious politics and economics. No wonder our school system is devoutly dedicated to demoralizing and blunting such minds.”

— Kenny Smith

“Everybody knows that the federal government promises a lot and delivers damn little, and pays for most of what it does deliver out of the earnings of individuals rather than the profits of great corporations.”

— Karl Hess

“There is no limit on earnings.”

— Earl Nightingale

“Observation over many years has taught us that the chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of good business conditions. The purchasers view the good current earnings as equivalent to 'earning power' and assume that prosperity is equivalent to safety.”

— Benjamin Graham

“The only thing you should do with pro forma earnings is ignore them.”

— Benjamin Graham

“Government as well as religion has furnished its schisms, its persecutions and its devices for fattening idleness on the earnings of the people.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“[W]e have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise the minimum wage. And the evidence is overwhelmingly positive: Hiking the minimum wage has little or no adverse effect on employment while significantly increasing workers' earnings.”

— Paul Krugman

“I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings and strictly honest, who complained of hard luck. A good character, good habits and iron industry are impregnable to the assaults of all ill-luck that fools ever dreamed.”

— Joseph Addison

“Mother is the dead heart of the family spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps, and watches the television.”

— Germaine Greer

“Earnings can change dramatically. Usually assets change slowly.”

— Walter Schloss

“If you don't feel comfortable making a rough estimate of the asset's future earnings, just forget it and move on. No one has the ability to evaluate every investment possibility. But omniscience isn't necessary; you only need to understand the actions you undertake.”

— Warren Buffett

“Accounting consequences do not influence our operating or capital-allocation decisions. When acquisition costs are similar, we much prefer to purchase $2 of earnings that is not reportable by us under standard accounting principles than to purchase $1 of earnings that is reportable.”

— Warren Buffett

“Calculate "owner earnings" to get a true reflection of value.”

— Warren Buffett

“Focus on return on equity, not earnings per share.”

— Warren Buffett

“I think that, every time you saw the word EBITDA, you should substitute the word "bullshit" earnings.”

— Charlie Munger

“Everyone caved, adopted loose [accounting] standards, and created exotic derivatives linked to theoretical models. As a result, all kinds of earnings, blessed by accountants, are not really being earned. When you reach for the money, it melts away. It was never there. It [accounting for derivatives] is just disgusting. It is a sewer, and if I'm right, there will be hell to pay in due course. All of you will have to prepare to deal with a blow-up of derivative books.”

— Charlie Munger

“The most difficult thing asked by our young is not our earnings but our ears.”

— Malcolm Forbes