Financial Prioritization Quotes

America is a business. If you can't afford to do something, no matter how much bellyaching everybody does... I'm so sorry, if you can't afford it, you shouldn't do it.

You're not sorry. You could've been here if you made the effort. But when did you ever make an effort for anybody but yourself? You're not interested in any of us or in anything we do. You think if you pay the bills, that's enough, don't you? Money! That's all you know. And all you give us is money. Have you even given us any time?

It's better to waste money than time. You can always get more money.

Money is very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota? Now, you would expect people to have an answer. But people were kind of shocked by the question. They never thought about it before. So, the most we got was people said, "Well, if I can't buy this Toyota, if I buy this Toyota, I can't buy a Honda." What is this thing? What is this value of price? Very hard to think about it.

American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.

Budget drives everything that we do.

We are at a crossroads over how the federal government in Washington and state legislatures and city councils across the land allocate their financial resources. Which fork we take will say a lot about Americans and our values.

My accountant regularly asks to take me to lunch. I always say I can't afford it.

You mortgage yourself sometimes. You know what you want to do, then you balance it against paying the rent.

If you have urgent current expenses to cover, then future priorities like college and retirement fall off your radar because they are simply less pressing. Scarcity of attention prevents us from seeing what's really important. The psychology of scarcity engrosses us in only our present needs.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

If I can't afford a house, or afford to keep it, I don't want to have it.

Pay your utilities, gas and other basic needs before paying on your debts.

The idea of a company that's earning money, not losing money, that's not, let's say 'industrially endangered,' to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one's counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level. First of all, it's certainly not necessary. It's doing it at the worst time. It's throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger unemployment heap for frankly no good reason.

We act in a pragmatic and careful manner. We reduce spending on budget items that do not constitute a priority.

America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford.

What better way to get to know a culture than to go there and learn their sports? And I say to people who tell me they can't travel, 'How much did you spend at the mall this year? How many times did you eat out? Take that money and go.'

I feel that your ambitions should always exceed the budget.

To those who say Britain cannot afford to invest in infrastructure, I say we cannot afford not to invest in our future.

Budgets are matters of priority and prioritizing. It's a high priority.

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 on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.

How many men I know who are earning dollars aplenty, but who are really earning little of what counts. They are so overwhelmingly engrossed in business that they get nothing from their dollars. The Juggernaut of dollar-making has crushed out of them every capacity for genuine enjoyment, every grace, every unselfish sentiment and instinct.

Part of the budget should be used to purchase the items that you really need, such as a new coat or boots. Part of the budget should then be set aside to buy things you fall in love with and can't live without.

I always judge what gives me the most fun and not where a better, more expensive team is.

The real reason I was lo-fi before was really just because that's what I could afford.