Quarterly Quotes & Sayings

The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine. — James Dickey

I didn't offer transparency. I provided one quarterly report in letter form. That was all you got. I basically demanded that if you're going to invest in my fund you need to accept my terms. The terms not being super highs, but just, I'm not going to cater to you. — Michael Burry

I work to promote the idea of sustainable capitalism driven by long-term considerations rather than quarterly profits, which seeks to better people's lives and the planet rather than destroy them. — Al Gore

Trust-me companies are companies whose financial results gallop ahead of their businesses, companies with seemingly perfect control over their quarterly sales and profits. Companies whose financial statements are loaded with footnotes: companies that short-sellers often attack but rarely dent. — Alex Berenson

There are only two reasons that minions don't kill you as soon as you are discovered. The first is that the 'boss' wants to do you himself, and the second is that he wants to gloat before he has his minions do it for him. Responsible evil bosses don't do either of these things; if ever I found myself in the position of villainous boss, I was going to have standing orders to dispatch anyone poking around and then send me a report. A quarterly report. Why bother me with the minutiae of day to day minioning? I was busy planning my siege on the Fortress of Solitude. I may have spent some time thinking about this. — Artemis Olsen

If I have sex, I know my quarterly estimated taxes must be due. And if it's oral sex, I know it's time to renew my driver's license. — Ray Romano

There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings. — Edmund Phelps

Although he reputedly hated the label of 'guru', Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the 'the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow' and Robert Heller described him as 'the greatest man in the history of management', praise indeed for a man who described himself as 'just an old journalist'. — Peter Drucker

If you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, you're worried about quarterly returns. — Peter Diamandis

What I loved about my partnership with 'Quarterly' was the fact that it bridges the online world with the real world. Sometimes we see these two worlds as separate entities, and to be able to establish a bridge is very exciting. — Nina Garcia

Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that. — Sam Altman

The fabric of Lady Islay's gown certainly cost as much as Claribel's entire quarterly allowance. It was a pearly silk taffeta shot with threads of silver. Her breasts were scarcely covered, and from there the gown fell straight to the ground in a hauntingly beautiful sweep of cloth.
The pink brought out the color of her hair- burnt amber enticed with brandy and buttercup. If only she had left it free around her face and perhaps created some charming curls! Claribel made up her mind to tell her privately about the newest curling irons. She herself had lovely corkscrew curls bobbing next to her ears. — Eloisa James

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

I have almost no interest in quarterly reports. Running a business or investing in a business based on quarterly earnings doesn't make any sense at all to me. — Gerry Schwartz

In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy. — James Surowiecki

It's still popular to ... insist that globalization is a rising tide that lifts all boats, but the hard reality is that the last thirty years have seen America's once proud and prosperous working class thrown to the wolves, so corporations could keep boosting their quarterly profits and the middle class could maintain a filmy illusion of wealth through access to cheap consumer goods. — John Michael Greer

There's a myth out there that you have to genuflect at the altar of quarterly earnings. But it's a false choice that you can either be a good fiduciary or promote values such as environmental sustainability. — Thomas Perez

Corporations today, by their razor sharp focus on the 'bottom line' and quarterly earnings, have lost their ability to innovate. — John Maeda

The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department. — Frank Zappa

Several record companies had rejected my song 'Owner of A Lonely Heart' on the grounds it was 'too left field.' I never create to make a hit just to satisfy some record company executive's quarterly profit statement. — Trevor Rabin

I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them.
[Letter to Herbert Putnam; in: Waters, Edward N.: Herbert Putnam: the tallest little man in the world; Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 33:2 (April 1976), p. 171] — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others--sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on--can sometimes have dangerous side effects. — Daniel H. Pink

Great employee development is focused far more on who people are and how they relate to others, and far less on overseeing projects, tasks, and deadlines. It's a conversation that can't wait for quarterly reviews - and oftentimes even weekly reviews are too far past the moment when things are ripe and ready for change. Ideally it starts in a person's first week on the job, and it doesn't end for as long as they're on your team. Your goal is to create a world where mentoring, accountability, and support are the norm. — Jonathan Raymond

His father read aloud, quietly, his voice steady and gentle, while he pressed a hand to Liam's delicate back, supporting his position.
...
She realized Dragos was reading the quarterly profit percentages from a stockholders' report. — Thea Harrison

He was nuts. He'd scammed the quarterly mental health exam and was certifiably insane.
Not that that's ever stopped me from sleeping with anyone. — Jordan Castillo Price

What's blocking action on climate change is what's blocking action on all the other issues that matter: it would cut into profits. Never mind the deep future, not when what's at stake is quarterly earnings. — Rebecca Solnit

Immigrants aren't the reason wages haven't gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns. — Barack Obama

In a well-known 1996 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Akerlof explained, using the language of modern economics, why the sexual revolution - contrary to common prediction, especially prediction by those in and out of the Church who wanted the teaching on birth control changed - had led to an increase in both illegitimacy and abortion.4 — Mary Eberstadt

This automatic feedback is another reason extreme athletes have found flow so frequently, but what if we're interested in pulling this trigger without help from the laws of physics? No mystery here. Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn't have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops - stock analysis, psychiatry, and medicine - even the best get worse over time. — Steven Kotler

I will keep a substantial long exposure to gold
which serves as a Jelly Donut antidote for my portfolio. While I'd love for our leaders to adopt sensible policies that would reduce the tail risks so that I could sell our gold, one nice thing about gold is that it doesn't even have quarterly conference calls. — David Einhorn

Just about everything put out by Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics is what I keep up with. And once in a while, I'll read the more mainstream comics - I like Grant Morrison's writing and some of Warren Ellis' stuff, although maybe they're more on the fringe of the mainstream. — Jeffrey Brown

In a larger business context, an example of the "Genius of the And" would be a company's constant attention to both long-term growth and quarterly results. — Peter Pande

I feel constantly the tension of the quarterly cycles, the drive to produce shareowner value at the cost sometimes of customer value and employee value. [But] if you take equal care of the employees, they will take equal care of the customers and then we will get an equal or better opportunity for our shareowners. — Marilyn C. Nelson

Logarithmic-scale graphs are of great value in analyzing stocks because they can clearly show acceleration or deceleration in the percentage rate of quarterly earnings increases. One inch anywhere on the price or earnings scale represents the same percentage change. This is not true of arithmetically scaled charts. On arithmetically scaled charts, a 100% price move from $10 to $20 shows the same space change as a 50% increase from $20 to $30. But a log-scale graph shows a 100% increase as twice as large as the 50% increase. Weekly charts in Daily Graphs Online are properly logarithmic. — William O'Neil

Thanks to Lana Turner, Eleven Eleven, The Nation, LIT Magazine (USA), Critical Quarterly (UK), Beautiful Outlaw Press, no press, The Capilano Review, cv2, Rhubarb and Centre A Gallery (Canada). — Erin Moure

Strategize yearly, plan quarterly, examine monthly, reflect weekly, act daily, and live #intentionally. — Farshad Asl

Annual Report of the Department of Education, 1928-9: Mortality rate 3.5 per thousand. This rate is somewhat higher than that for the country as a whole. Medical officers make quarterly inspections of all pupils and special attention is given to delicate pupils. Numbers under detention 6,515. Seven boys and sixteen girls died. — Heather Laskey

Thomas Wollaston, in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, complained that Darwin did no seem to know what a species actually was. The British Quarterly, deliberately sitting up trouble, speculated that a time might come when a monkey could propose marriage to a genteel British lady. Perhaps cruelest of all was a cartoon in Punch magazine, depicting a gorilla with a sign on its neck. Deliberately evoking the anti-slavery tract of Darwin's Wedgwood forbears, the sign read:Am I a Man and a Brother? — Jonathan Clements

Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through improvement of product and service for the future, not by the quarterly dividend. — W. Edwards Deming

Be true to yourself, and, um, don't worry about some large companies' quarterly profit index. — Natalie Merchant

Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America's literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has launched our favorite writers. It has made a special claim for the quarterly as such, being both timely and lasting, free of the news of the day or the pressure to please a crowd. Most of all, the Review has shown, repeatedly, that works of imagination can be as stylish and urgent as the flashiest feature reporting, and can do more to refocus our picture of the world. — Lorin Stein

I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which 'The Recognitions' ' debt to 'Ulysses' was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read 'Ulysses. — William Gaddis

The reason why the book begins with the wish to "play back" how the two met is precisely to see if repeating the scenario might tell the narrator why he is so thoroughly smitten, to play with the scenario all over again, perhaps to master it, as Freud says about repetition. But there cannot be a "reason." An attraction that needs a reason is not a reason the heart or the body cares much about. — Andre Aciman

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term. — J. Irwin Miller

on this paper will be twenty cents per year, payable quarterly in advance, at the place — Various

Forget about it," he said. "Sell it to a philosophy quarterly or an urban anthropology journal, or write a fucking script if you want and let Spike Lee shoot the motherfucker, but it's not going to run in any magazine of mine. — Roberto Bolano

I think companies trying to exercise a so-called inversion should be hit with an exit tax. So I want to change behaviors, and I am deeply distressed about quarterly capitalism, because I think it is causing businesses to make decisions that are not helping the long-term profitability of American corporations or the success of our economy. — Hillary Clinton

For instance, the need of large corporations to analyze market opportunities according to established metrics prevented them from grasping the contours of nascent markets emerging around new technologies. Lower short-term profits from these new markets go against the culture of maximizing quarterly share prices. And the dilemma replicates itself with each wave of innovation: as the first companies to exploit disruptive technologies gain and grow, "it becomes progressively more difficult for them to enter the even newer smaller markets destined to become the large ones of the future."47 — Moises Naim

The point of art is not to give you what you already feel comfortable with; that's reporting, not art, that TV, not art, that's magaziney art, not art. Art gives you so personal an interpretation that it compels you to say, This here is more real than what I know is really out there. — Andre Aciman

The pay and privilege of the captains of industry are now so closely linked to the quarterly dividend that they may find it personally unrewarding to do what is right for the company. — W. Edwards Deming

I understand quarterly billing, how the record companies run. — Nikki Sixx

Is it really necessary to reward the CEO with several million dollars? Why isn't it logical or common sense to pay the minimum-wage employee another quarter, give a quarterly fifty-dollar bonus, or even provide a two-hundred-dollar gas gift card? — John-Talmage Mathis

Her touch is like doing simple math
When she sleeps in the bed, subtracting clothes
There is a red ink, like a sparkling red wine, adding colors
Dividing body, remembering gods, without multiplying — Santosh Kalwar

There will be no good business unless the majority comes to agree that we should demand more from business than large quarterly returns. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

On investments, 1998: Where I'm from we don't trust paper. Wealth is what's here on the premises. If I open a cupboard and see, say, 30 cans of tomato sauce and a five-pound bag of rice, I get a little thrill of well-being - much more so than if I take a look at the quarterly dividend report from my mutual fund. — Garrison Keillor

He watched her in the aisles: Molly, his pretty baseball wife, with her ceaseless vigilance for lumps, her insistence on quarterly medical checkups for him and Willy, her controlled fear of the dark; her hard-bought knowledge that time is luck. She knew the value of their days. She could hold a moment by its stem. She had taught him to relish. — Thomas Harris

Being captive to quarterly earnings isn't consistent with long-term value creation. This pressure and the short term focus of equity markets make it difficult for a public company to invest for long-term success, and tend to force company leaders to sacrifice long-term results to protect current earnings. — Charles Koch

After careful consideration, we have decided that for our next fiscal year, we'll issue guidance on comparable store used unit sales and on earnings per share only for the full fiscal year. We will no longer issue quarterly guidance. This decision reflects our continuing focus on longer-term store, sales, and earnings growth and on return on invested capital, and our recognition that the performance in shorter-term periods can be more volatile than over the longer term. As we report our quarterly results, we plan to comment on how our performance is tracking against our annual guidance. — Austin Ligon

We have it backward. Faith is not business, and there is no such thing as quarterly growth of the inward life. — Ricky Maye

If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one's choice is marked under the category of a refusal, and is thus never really free: it has the duress of a recoil." With literary belief, however, "one is always free to choose not to believe." This, Wood argues, is the freedom of literature; it is what constitutes its "reality. — James Wood

Hermione end up with Ron. As the author told Emma Watson, guest editor for the upcoming edition of the quarterly British lifestyle magazine "Wonderland, — Anonymous

So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean. — Frank Luntz

The filmmakers aren't running the studios anymore. Sometimes people who like films are making them, but by and large, they have to go report quarterly earnings and all that stuff. The competition is so huge that it's very hard to get people to show up to see any movie in the theater, much less an original one that isn't a version of something else they saw. — Tom Hanks

Farms and ranches contend with much more than quarterly reports and profit margins - the weather can wreak havoc on their quality of life and economic viability. When natural disasters strike, we must do all we can to assist the backbone of our economy. — Ruben Hinojosa

Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce. — Christopher Hitchens

I love the game. I think it's a great game because you find out a lot about yourself. You test your mettle every week. There's no grey area, there's instant gratification and there are no quarterly reports. We're not just doing a little bit better. You know every Sunday what happened. — Bill Parcells

National Lampoon lost its audience when it went from monthly magazine to bimonthly to quarterly to annual to just making movies. — Ricky Van Veen

Our approach has worked for us. Look at the fun we, our managers, and our shareholders are having. More people should copy us. It's not difficult, but it looks difficult because it's unconventional - it isn't the way things are normally done. We have low overhead, don't have quarterly goals and budgets or a standard personnel system, and our investing is much more concentrated than average. It's simple and common sense. — Charlie Munger

'Drawn & Quarterly' has always given me complete editorial control over my books and comics, so any decision about what to include or exclude from the book was my own. — Adrian Tomine

That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attempted
although married six months.
Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not sure
we got it right.
He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.
Early next day
I wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had published
in a small quarterly magazine.
Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.
Or should I say ideal.
Neither of us had ever seen Venice. — Anne Carson