quotations about corporations
Corporations are like protean bacteria; you hit them with accountability and they mutate and change their names.
DOUG ANDERSON
attributed, The Big Book of Business Quotations
People on corporate conveyor belts, like animals in slaughter-chutes are all part of the same big massacre of joy.
BRYANT MCGILL
Simple Reminders
The big guys who ran things didn't want you thinking or feeling. It slowed down production. They wanted you scared and working so you wouldn't bump up against the truth--life could be fun. Yup, they wanted you scared. They wanted you grim. They wanted you madly cranking out Barbie dolls or Post Toasties or Xerox, or they wanted you overworked and underpaid at teaching so you could at least feel smart, and they wanted you to keep having kids so you'd have to keep working at whatever job you were stuck in and not have time to think or feel or, if you did, you certainly wouldn't have time to do anything about it, or even get close to the big fun, the fun that belonged only to them. And then they wanted your kids to hop on the same treadmill.
BILL RIPLEY
Prisoners
Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
State of the Union Address, Dec. 2, 1902
The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.
RUTHERFORD B. HAYES
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes
Holidays are comin'
The kids are getting fat
Put another penny in the corporation hat
UB40
"Hand That Rocks the Cradle"
The corporations don't have to lobby the government anymore. They are the government.
JIM HIGHTOWER
attributed, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
The multinational corporation
takes its profits from the starving nations.
Another product for you to buy,
you'll keep paying, until you die.
NAPALM DEATH
"Instinct of Survival"
We shall see these great corporations spanning the continent from ocean to ocean--single, consolidated lines, not connecting Albany with Buffalo, or Lake Erie with the Hudson, but uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific, with termini at New York and San Francisco. Already the disconnected members of these future leviathans have built up States in the wilderness, and chosen their attorneys Senators of the United States. Now their power is in its infancy; in a very few years they will re-enact, on a larger theatre and on a grander scale, with every feature magnified, the scenes which were lately witnessed on the narrow stage of a single State.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
"A Chapter of Erie", North American Review, July 1869
Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks -- they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics -- or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications -- is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else.
NICK HARKAWAY
The Blind Giant
Corporations are not legal "persons" with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.
KALLE LASN
Culture Jam
Corporations get the breaks
Keeping almost everything they make
Tell us just how long it's going to take
For it to trickle down
When will it trickle down?
DEPECHE MODE
"Poorman"
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic destroyed.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864
Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their services?
YUVAL NOAH HARARI
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
Large corporations welcome innovation and individualism in the same way the dinosaurs welcomed large meteors.
SCOTT ADAMS
Dilbert
Well, here's the funny thing, sir. You take a big corporation in America, say like General Motors or Du Pont or U.S. Steel. The thing they're most afraid of is socialism, and at the same time they themselves are socialist states.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
They [corporations] cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate, for they have no souls.
EDWARD COKE
"The Case of Sutton's Hospital", The Reports of Sir Edward Coke
Well, family, we should be proud. We took on corporate America and broke even.
HOMER SIMPSON
"Super Franchise Me", The Simpsons
A corporation is an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
It's ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They're totalitarian institutions -- you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.
NOAM CHOMSKY
How the World Works