Quotes about corporations
Max Berry -
She was going to go home after this and sip red wine and stare at the wall, I could tell. She would wonder why she was doing this, struggling against commercial interests at a corporate hospital when all she wanted to do was help people, and in the morning, when she walked out of her beautiful home and unlocked her convertible, she would remember.
John Cage - M: Writings '67-'72
Power and profit structures're out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they're obliged to use new gimmicks.
Noam Chomsky -
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.
Andrew Young -
Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)
Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
People on corporate conveyor belts, like animals in slaughter-chutes are all part of the same big massacre of joy.
Anthony T. Hincks -
Who really owns the Earth?Corporations? Governments?Charity Organizations?Or...Should it be the people?You decide!
Albert Einstein -
I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.
Arundhati Roy - The Cost of Living
At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?
Thomas Piketty -
Income from labor [in the United States] is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.
Garth Ennis - Volume 9: The Big Ride
When it comes to Vought, or any corporate outfit really, all that counts to them is profit. They send their kids on planes built by the lowest bidder. They travel on the fuckin' things themselves. Company jets or first class, they still go on 'em. Safety costs. Money's God.
Garth Ennis - Volume 9: The Big Ride
When it comes to Vought, or any corporate outfit really, all that counts to them is profit. They send their kids on planes built by the lowest bidder. They travel on the fuckin, things themselves. Company jets or first class, they still go on 'em. Safety costs. Money's God.
Wes Jackson - Becoming Native to This Place
... the forces of power, particularly corporate power, are impatient with what is adequate for a coherent community. Because power gains so little from community in the short run, it does not hesitate to destroy community for the long run.
Nick Harkaway - The Blind Giant
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-
Erol Ozan -
Globalization is a form of artificial intelligence.
Kim Stanley Robinson - Antarctica
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—
Chris Hedges - The Death of the Liberal Class
The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Endangering human life for profit should be a universal crime.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
When picking a leader, choose a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
More people have died in the name of religion than any other cause on earth. Is massacring God's creations really serving God - or the devil? And what father would want to see his children constantly divided and fighting? What God would allow a single human life to be sacrificed for monetary gain? Again, the Creator or the devil?
Naomi Klein -
Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn't. You can't unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons' sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That's just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that's what you get. Build a
Steven Magee -
Corporate controlled governments protect the interests of the corporations and not the common people.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Any government that places profit before people is pure evil.
David James Duncan -
Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".
Jonah Lehrer - Imagine: How Creativity Works
...Why are corporations so fleeting?...Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights. They stifle conversations, discourage dissent, and suffocate social networks. Rather than maximizing employee creativity they become obsessed with minor efficiencies.
Diane Ravitch - Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools
Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education is not ‘broken.’ Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it.
Antonio Guadarrama - Cóatl: el misterio de la serpiente
La historia no ha cambiado. Hace mil anos ellos eran los duenos del mundo. Hoy en dia lo siguen siendo. Claro, lo tienen que compartir con los grandes magnates de la tierra, esos que controlan el petroleo, las drogas, la tecnologia y por supuesto la television y la radio. La Iglesia domina los miedos y la promesa de la salvacion; las grandes empresas tambien manipulan los miedos y los paliativos para estos: la satisfaccion de las necesidades basicas - y las no tan basicas que hoy en dia parecen
Barbara Ehrenreich - Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.
Steven Magee -
It must be remembered that the forty hour work week until age sixty five was designed by governments and corporations and not the medical profession.
Steven Magee -
Nature is in the process of shutting down corrupt corporations and their government minions.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people, but those of multinational corporations.
Naomi Klein - No Logo
Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-
Steven Magee -
The USA is a beautiful country...when you take the corrupt corporations and their government minions out of the equation.
Steven Magee -
Most politicians are corrupt as they do not represent the masses that voted for them, but rather they choose to return numerous favors to the corporations that funded their election campaigns.
Steven Magee -
The Democratic Party would like to be re-elected so that they can continue to uphold almost no Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) whistle-blower complaints, enforce hardly any police internal affairs allegations, and corrupt corporations with lobbyists can continue operating outside of the law.
Tarun J. Tejpal - The Alchemy of Desire
It was here I learnt that corporate principles and military principles are basically the same. Insulation. Illusion. Hype. Activity.
Michael Moore -
[Bill] Clinton was a pretty good president for a Republican.
Edward Abbey - Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests.
Robert B. Reich -
A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.
Thomas Jefferson - Volume 10: 1 May 1816 to 18 January 1817
I hope we shall ... crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.
Steven Magee -
The legal system has been designed by governments and corporations to protect them from the common people.
Steven Magee -
Corporations and their government minions are capable of anything...just look at the frauds the recent wars became known as. Hundreds of thousands killed in the name of corporate "liberation".
Steven Magee -
You cannot expect a corrupt law enforcement system to prosecute the illegal activities of corporations and their government minions.
Steven Magee -
Beware of corporate government cops.
Steven Magee -
The USA legal system is designed to enrich lawyers, protect the government and corporations, and shaft the general public.
Thomas Jefferson - Volume 10: 1 May 1816 to 18 January 1817
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.
Derrick Jensen - Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization
Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.
John Perkins - Jackals & the Truth about Global Corruption
In response to my question about how we might rein in the empire, he said, "That's why I'm meeting with you. Only you in the United States can change it. Your government created this problem and your people must solve it. You've got to insist that Washington honor its commitment to democracy, even when deomcratically elected leaders nationalize your corrupting corporations. You must take control of your corporations and your government. The people of the United States have a great deal of power.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations
Steven Magee -
USA corporations are legally regulated by laws which their managers know are rarely enforced. This criminal activity is what the USA government calls: Deregulation.
Fairclough Norman -
the government tends to act like a corporation treating the public as its consumers rather than its citizens
Bill Ripley - Prisoners
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
Steven Magee -
Corporations turned the human into a robot a long time ago.
Barbara Ehrenreich -
She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.
Arundhati Roy -
NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.
Wendell Berry -
Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. (from 'Compromis
Vandana Shiva -
The myth of "free choice" begins with "free market" and "free trade". When five transnational corporations control the seed market, it is not a free market, it is a cartel.
Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
We live in the richest country in the world. There's plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle - the freedom, equality and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars- and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat.
C.S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." 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. Hence, naturally
Michael Monroe - Afterlife
We don’t want our politicians bending to the whims of whichever corporation has the money to pay them off.
Tarun Sharma -
No matter how big a company is, one has to always look at business basics.
Steven Magee -
The standard business model for corporations is to lie, confuse and deny anything that may threaten their profitability.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
A true democratic society is supposed to serve its people, not big businesses. The welfare of its citizens, not corporate pockets. But when you have corporations buying the seats of our political leaders, who do you think they will serve?
Bill Maher - When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terro
The real axis of evil in America is the genius of our marketing and the gullibility of our people.
Alan G. Robinson - The Idea-Driven Organization: Unlocking the Power in Bottom-Up Ideas
Research has found that in most companies managers who get promoted rapidly spend most of their time networking and politicking, while their more effective colleagues spent their time building their units and developing their people.
Amit Kalantri -
I don't waste food, water, money, time and talent.
Amit Kalantri -
Successful companies are built by investing large amount of money and hundreds of litres of sweat.
Amit Kalantri -
Successful companies are built by investing lare amount of money and hundreds of litres of sweat.
Steve Maraboli -
Many companies expect loyal customers without providing loyal service. This has been the visionary failure of countless corporations.
Rutherford B. Hayes - Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States
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
Trevor D. Richardson - Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files
Why help make big companies bigger when you can get the same thing from the little guy and actually help someone accomplish their dream?
Steven Magee -
We live in truly unbelievable times. Autism is an epidemic in most westerncountries, western governments are nothing more than corrupt corporations, and corporations areroutinely suppressing information regarding the toxicity of many common household items. The resultis that many people are unnecessarily suffering from easily preventable developmental problems,sickness and cancer.
Michael Hureaux-Perez -
All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go w
Steven Magee -
The leading research in the adverse human health effects of electromagnetic radiation is not being done by well funded governments or corporations, it is coming from a few self funded independent researchers.
Steve Bivans - Save the Earth: the Guide to Sustainable Shire Living
Let's put our money where our mouth is; let's invest in the future by investing in the education of our youth and the re-education of those who need it and aren't so young anymore. It's not charity; it's an investment in the mental, intellectual, and social infrastructure of our country and our planet. Charity is something you give to corporations when they commit crimes of fraud and plunge the world into economic turmoil.
Christopher McDougall - and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy - but that's okay, because it's largely their fault.
Steven Magee -
Very few of the common people realize that the political and legal systems have been corrupted by decades of corporate lobbying.
Kenneth Patchen - Collected Poems
Take taking from those that give & nobody anywhere will need any more such gifts.
Vincent A. Gallagher - The True Cost of Low Prices: The Violence of Globalization
The fact that the United States has political, economic, and legal structures that do indeed create incentives to control hazards (in the workplace) is one the reasons the corporations have moved to Latin America and Asia.
David Marusek - Mind Over Ship
Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are.Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped back at them at a handsome profit.Alas, those days are gone. We live in a b
John McMurtry - The Cancer Stage of Capitalism
Armed with the new right to sell their products back to host societies, they can bleed both producing and buying populations at the same time. That is why under new international "free trade" agreements private corporations and businesses have increasingly demanded that governments deregulate and lower taxes so that they are not obliged to pay the cost of sustaining the life of host-societies or their environments.
John McMurtry -
Minimum standards to promote workers' wages, health and safety, to safeguard the community against pollution and degradation, and to ensure basic life goods for all as a basic contract for civil society was between 1945 and the mid-1970s, in fact, a rapidly evolving framework which inhibited the causes and effects of a corporate market system committed to an opposed goal.
Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
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.
Timothy Wu -
Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former p
James Livingston -
the decisive movement toward corporate capitalism began in 1895-1896.
Arundhati Roy - Capitalism: A Ghost Story
Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?
Arundhati Roy - Capitalism: A Ghost Story
Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work.
Naomi Klein - No Logo
In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain ca
Michael Harrington -
Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year—and setting their compensation for themselves—are not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages.
Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet
One of the curious aspects of the Twenty-First Century was the great delusion amongst many people, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were best exercised on technological platforms owned by corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible.
Michael Hogan - Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy: Latin America in the Third Millennium
We give more economic aid to multinational corporations to increase their profits than we do to all the countries in the world combined.
Benito Mussolini -
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power" <-- This is a fake quote, it appears in none of the writings or recorded speeches of Mussolini.― Benito Mussolini
A.E. Samaan -
There is a lot of talk about "rigged games" as of late. Big government is the most insipid of all "rigged games". There is no choice available to the public allowing it to avoid a big over-arching government. You can always chose not do business with a big corporation. Corporations that are distasteful can be avoided. A big, powerful, government bent on intrusion cannot be avoided.
Noam Chomsky -
How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster'; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible worki
Trevor D. Richardson - Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files
People used to make money, but somewhere along the way, it started making us.
Noam Chomsky - Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World
Talk about corporate greed and everything is really crucially beside the point, in my view, and really should be recognized as a very big regression from what working people, and a lot of others, understood very well a century ago. 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 s
Kalle Lasn - Culture Jam: How To Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge - And Why We Must
Corporations are not legal “persons” with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi - The Terrorist's Daughter
People keep saying someone should fix the system, the system is corrupt. What they don’t get is; they are the system. It’s just like how people hate McDonald’s and Coca Cola. People say they are evil corporations, terrorists and ruining the health of the future but then, how are these brands live and running all over the world, making billions of dollars of profit every day? People still buy it, that’s how. The majority of the world is people who know something is bad for them but keep consuming
Carlos Roche -
We are trained to be employees, but no one said that we have endure a limited salary that barely keeps pace with inflation.