quotations about corporations
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
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
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
You only get two choices: corporate A or corporate B, and that's all you're gonna get.
JELLO BIAFRA
SFSonic, June 21, 2018
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
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
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
A corporation often means the protection of a few to the detriment of the many.
F. A. KLEIN
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
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
The corporation feels no pain.
BETH MACY
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
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
We live in an age where corporations are people and employees are not.
CLIFFORD COHEN
attributed, goodreads
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
The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud.
J. G. BALLARD
Kingdom Come
The public corruption is the foundation on which corporations always depend for their political power. There is a natural tendency to coalition between them and the lowest strata of political intelligence and morality; for their agents must obey, not question. The lobby is their home, and the lobby thrives as political virtue decays. The ring is their symbol of power, and the ring is the natural enemy of political purity and independence.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
"A Chapter of Erie", North American Review, July 1869
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
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
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
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