quotations about corporations
As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.
JOEL BAKAN
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
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"
She married a gold mine with a time bomb
He went off to be legend
Now her love's a corporation
And she's just post humorous
SAM PHILLIPS
"Entertainmen"
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
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.
DERRICK JENSEN
Endgame
If anything is due to a corporation, it is not due to the individual members thereof, nor do the members individually owe what the corporation owes.
JUSTINIAN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Modern society has created a class of artificial beings who bid fair soon to be the masters of their creator. It is but a very few years since the existence of a corporation controlling a few million dollars was regarded as a subject of grave apprehension, and now this country already contains single organizations which wield a power represented by hundreds of millions. These bodies are the creatures of single States; but in New York, in Pennsylvania, in Maryland, in New Jersey, and not in those States alone, they already are establishing despotisms which no spasmodic popular effort will be able to shake off. Everywhere, and at all times, however, they illustrate the truth of the old maxim of the common law, that corporations have no souls.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
"A Chapter of Erie", North American Review, July 1869
The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN
attributed, The Big Book of Business Quotations
A large corporation is more like Australia: it's impossible to see the whole landscape at once and there are so many things capable of maiming or killing you.
ERIKA HALL
Just Enough Research
Loyalty is dead, the experts proclaim, and the statistics seem to bear them out. On average, U.S. corporations now lose half their customers in five years, half their employees in four, and half their investors in less than one. We seem to face a future in which the only business relationships will be opportunistic transactions between virtual strangers.
FREDERICK F. REICHHELD
The Loyalty Effect
What is a corporation? One might expect to find a good description of a corporation in Citizens United or the other corporate rights cases, but the Supreme Court is strangely silent on that point. Instead, corporate rights decisions from the Court come packaged in metaphorical clouds. It is not corporations attacking our laws; it is "speakers" and "advocates of ideas," "voices" and "persons," and variations on what Justice Paul Stevens called in his Citizens United dissent, "glittering generalities."
JEFFREY D. CLEMENTS
Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It
Of the world's 175 largest nation-states and private firms, 112 are corporations.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER
The Chessboard and the Web
Corporate principles and military principles are basically the same. Insulation. Illusion. Hype. Activity.
TARUN J. TEJPAL
The Alchemy of Desire
All corporatism - even when practised in societies where hard work, enterprise and cooperation are as highly valued as in Korea - encourages inflexibility, discourages individual accountability, and risks magnifying errors by concealing them.
MARGARET THATCHER
Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World
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.
CHRIS HEDGES
The Death of the Liberal Class
Corporations rule the day
Well you know the pendulum throws
Farther out to the one side, swinging
Has to sweep back the other way
PEARL JAM
"Undone"
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 working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.
NOAM CHOMSKY
attributed, Supermarket Monsters
I mean, to talk about "corporate greed" is like talking about "military weapons" or something like that?there just is no other possibility. A corporation is something that is trying to maximize power and profit: that's what it is. There is no "phenomenon" of corporate greed, and we shouldn't mislead people into thinking there is. It's like talking about "robber's greed" or something like that?it's not a meaningful thing, it's misleading. A corporation's purpose is to maximize profit and market share and return to investors, and all that kind of stuff, and if its officers don't pursue that goal, for one thing they are legally liable for not pursuing it.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Understanding Power
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.
ROBERT REICH
attributed, The Big Book of Business Quotations
[It] is necessary to raise the corporation above the level of a mere machine. To be a moral agent, something must have reasons for what it does, not simply causes for what it does, and for something to be a moral agent, some of those reasons must be moral ones. Obviously, corporations are unable to think as humans, but they can employ reasons of a sort, and this is shown by the fact that they can be morally accountable. That is, with the proper internal structure, corporations, like humans, can be liable to give an account of their behavior where the account stipulates which moral reasons prompted their behavior.
THOMAS DONALDSON
Corporations and Morality