quotations about corporations
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
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Free Market Fantasies
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
The corporation feels no pain.
BETH MACY
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
You only get two choices: corporate A or corporate B, and that's all you're gonna get.
JELLO BIAFRA
SFSonic, June 21, 2018
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
A corporation often means the protection of a few to the detriment of the many.
F. A. KLEIN
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
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
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
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
We live in an age where corporations are people and employees are not.
CLIFFORD COHEN
attributed, goodreads
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
But you can't put a corporation in jail; you just take their money, and it's not really their money anyway.
BETH MACY
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
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
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
And then a great nation
Put into operation an evolutionary plan
Now mighty corporations and politicians rule the land
Wish I could remember when
We were more innocent
THE KINKS
"Now and Then"
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