quotations about corporations
The "corporatization of America" during the past century has been an attack on democracy--and on markets, part of the shift from something resembling "capitalism" to the highly administered markets of the modern state/corporate era. A current variant is called "minimizing the state," that is, transferring decision-making power from the public arena to somewhere else: "to the people" in the rhetoric of power; to private tyrannies, in the real world.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Profit Over People
Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.
EDWARD THURLOW
attributed, Literary Extracts, from English and other works
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
Talk about corporate greed is nonsense. Corporations are greedy by their nature. They're nothing else -- they are instruments for interfering with markets to maximize profit, and wealth and market control. You can't make them more or less greedy; I mean maybe you can sort of force them, but it's like taking a totalitarian state and saying "Be less brutal!" Well yeah, maybe you can get a totalitarian state to be less brutal, but that's not the point -- the point is not to get a tyranny to be less brutal, but to get rid of it.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Free Market Fantasies
You only get two choices: corporate A or corporate B, and that's all you're gonna get.
JELLO BIAFRA
SFSonic, June 21, 2018
It is a fiction, a shade, a nonentity, but a reality for legal purposes. A corporation aggregate is only in abstracto--it is invisible, immortal, and rests only in intendment and consideration of the law.
EDWARD COKE
Case of Sutton's Hospital
Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
The Roosevelt Policy
The corporation feels no pain.
BETH MACY
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
Let the corporations do as they please -- pillage the environment, falsify their advertising, rig the securities markets -- and it is none of the federal government's business to interfere with the will of heaven.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Waiting for the Barbarians
If corporations wanted to be legal citizens they could damned well shoulder the responsibilities of good citizenship as well as the benefits.
CHARLES STROSS
Rule 34
We live in an age where corporations are people and employees are not.
CLIFFORD COHEN
attributed, goodreads
This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part "the free world" seems to be regarding it as merely normal.
WENDELL BERRY
Bringing it to the Table
I hope that we shall ... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to George Logan, Nov. 12, 1816
Corporations are people, my friend ... of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings my friend.
MITT ROMNEY
speech in Des Moines, Aug. 11, 2011
There are bad people and there are bad corporations. Just as there are good people and good corporations. That might seem too black and white, but what can I tell ya?
JAMES MURDOCH
interview, The Guardian, June 6, 2009
A corporation often means the protection of a few to the detriment of the many.
F. A. KLEIN
attributed, Day's Collacon
The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Antarctica
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
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
If only one didn't know that at the secret heart of all such organizations, corporations and governments alike, it still came down to a finite number of fallible people talking to each other....
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Cryoburn