quotations about corporations
Can we design a different corporation, an entity that engages in economic activity with more responsibility and ethical conduct? Can we conceive of corporations as holding public duties rather than constitutional rights? Or are we destined to become a corporate nation of underpaid hucksters in clown suits, trying to juice corporate profit and executive compensation by pushing school kids around?
JEFFREY D. CLEMENTS
Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It
The corporation has no choice but to do the will of its master. Corporations regularly allow themselves to be bought out or make decisions that will result in massive amounts of money made in the short term but will result in the collapse of the corporation in the long term. They are programmed to commit a kind of corporate suicide when it suits the stockholders.
WILLIAM IRWIN
30 Rock and Philosophy: We Want to Go to There
No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts. They have kids. They get jobs. They get sick. They thrive. They dance. They live. They love. And they die. And that matters. That matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.
ELIZABETH WARREN
speech at Democratic National Convention, Sep. 5, 2012
If you abandon the political arena, somebody is going to be there. Corporations aren't going to go home and join the PTA. They are going to run things.
NOAM CHOMSKY
How the World Works
Corporation: a miniature totalitarian state governed by a hierarchy of unelected officials who take a dim view of individualism, free speech, equality and eggheads. The backbone of all Western democracies.
RICK BAYAN
The Cynic's Dictionary
Corporations are social organizations, the theater in which men and women realize or fail to realize purposeful and productive lives.
LESTER BANGS
attributed, The Big Book of Business Quotations
The United States ... celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
CHRIS HEDGES
"Why The United States Is Destroying Education", truthdig, April 10, 2011
Liberals support the idea that individuals are more important than corporations, that as long as there are welfare programs for corporations there should be welfare programs for individuals.
JON CARROLL
attributed, The Best Liberal Quotes Ever
Please don't waste-away in front of a TV waiting to win a lottery during the precious few hours you are not imprisoned in corporate shackles.
BRYANT MCGILL
Simple Reminders
There was a time when corporations played a minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.
WOODROW WILSON
"The Old Order Changeth,", The New Freedom
In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
The Bed of Procrustes
As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.
JOEL BAKAN
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Progressive Principles
The corporation's boiling over
Everybody's taking over
WALL OF VOODOO
"Crack the Bell"
For all their alleged power, big corporations are often powerless when it comes to the simple task of surviving. As Williamson notes, "Only 67 of the firms in the Fortune 500 in 1955 remained there by 2011." "The average age of a company listed on the S&P 500 has fallen from almost 60 years old in the 1950s to less than 20 years currently," a team of Credit Suisse analysts wrote last month. And the death rate is accelerating.
JONAH GOLDBERG
"'Blade Runner' curse isn't a curse; it's normal", San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2017
Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it.
NOAM CHOMSKY
interview with David Barsamian, Alternative Radio, September 11, 2003
A corporation does seem like a family ... a hotbed of passion, rivalry, and dreams that build or destroy careers.
PAULA BERNSTEIN
Family Ties
A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image.
JOEL BAKAN
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
Corporations are very often useful bodies of men; but they more frequently outlive their usefulness and become corpori mortui to all intents and purposes.
DAVID JENNINGS
attributed, Day's Collacon
That corporations are the creatures of the Crown must be universally admitted.
LORD KENYON
King v. Ginever, 1796