Bean Counting Quotes & Sayings

Rich people always have a certain degree of debt. Apparently it helps to reduce taxes. I'm not so hot on the bean-counting side. — Felix Dennis

There is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. — John Ralston Saul

No relationship is absolutely reciprocal. Sometimes, when couples try to split everything in half, they discover that the relationship is not a partnership but a bean counting exercise. Striving for reciprocity in a relationship can be unhealthy. — Sylvain Reynard

And he showed, using methods which would today be considered exemplary applications of systematic textual analysis but which one of his contemporary critics derided as the bean-counting mentality of "a born Chancellor of the Exchequer," that this vagueness in Homer's color descriptions was the rule, not the exception. — Guy Deutscher

My philosophy is not a bean-counting, accounting 'look at this.' It is a philosophy that smaller government is better government, and government that is closer to the people is best of all. — John Bolton

As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization
our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity
to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists. — John Ralston Saul