Quotes about corporal (867 quotes, page 6)

“A liberal public is interesting to have as an audience. It is for that very reason that corporations make such an effort to ally themselves with cultural institutions.”

Hans Haacke (1936) conceptual political artist

Deborah Solomon " The Way We Live Now: 3-26-00: Questions for Hans Haacke; School for Scandal http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/26/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-3-26-00-questions-for-hans-haacke-school-for-scandal.html," in: The New York Times Biographical Service, Vol. 31 (2000), p. 588
2000s

Effort

“Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens to understand the difference between the free-market capitalism that made our country great and the corporate cronyism that is now corrupting our political process, strangling democracy and devouring our national treasures.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. (1954) American activist

In "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (11 December 2003).

Democracy , Understanding , Country

“As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.”

Joel Bakan (1959) Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 3, The Externalizing Machines, p. 60

“Part of America's industrial problems is the aim of its corporate managers. Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products or service…The Japanese corporate credo, on the other hand, is that a company should become the world's most efficient provider of whatever product and service it offers. Once it becomes the world leader and continues to offer good products, profits follow.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Source: Out Of The Crisis (1982), p. 99

Money , World , Business , Problem

“A good job should lead to security in retirement. I ask Congress to enact new safeguards for 401K and pension plans. Employees who have worked hard and saved all their lives should not have to risk losing everything if their company fails. Through stricter accounting standards and tougher disclosure requirements, corporate America must be made more accountable to employees and shareholders and held to the highest standards of conduct.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

“Like a forensic accountant trying to solve a corporate fraud, following the trail of money around the circle is a good way to understand what actually happens as capitalism unfolds.”

Jim Stanford (1961) Canadian economist

Part 2, Chapter 10, Closing The Little Circle, p. 121
Economics For Everyone (2008)

Money , Way , Understanding , Fraud

“Let me tell you about what we call our field trips. It may surprise you to know, that I have personally visited, with many of my associates, practically every city in the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico. If any of you has done this, you realize what big a country it is. It has taken me weeks and weeks of the hardest kind of work and continual travel to accomplish this. I which that my duties were such that I could do more of it; and I am trying to arrange my affairs so that I can. On these trips I visit from five to ten dealers a day. I meet them in their own places of business, talk with them across their own desks and solicit from them suggestions and criticisms as to their relations with the Corporation; the character of the product; the Corporation's policies; the trend of consumer demand; their viewpoint as to the future, and many other things that such contact makes possible. I solicit criticism of anything and everything.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 343

Travel , Business , Future , Personality

“Persistance, dedication
Consistent, motivation,
resistance to stagnation of information,
distribute it free to the entire population
No hesitation, makin it public
No privitazation from corporations”

Talib Kweli (1975) American rapper

Name of the Game (track 10)
Albums, Reflection Eternal (2000)

Motivation

“In hindsight, I have come to believe the discovery of the tapes may prove to be an historic event in more than one way. At a time when the United States government acknowledges that 2 million conversations were overheard by authorized eavesdroppers in a twelve month period, and at least an equal number were being recorded by private dectecies, suspicious spouses, corporate spies, special agents, and blackmailers; at a time when people like me conduct their lives under the assumption that their telephone lines are tapped; and at a time when devices such as the bug-in-the-martini-olive are proliferating, the disastrous consequences that flowed from Nixon’s fateful decision to record White House conversations may serve to awaken the nation to the threat posed to the little privacy that remains to us.”

Fred Thompson (1942–2015) American politician and actor

page 92
At That Point in Time, Tapes and the threat of wiretapping

Fate , People , Way , Decision

“Every endeavor should be used to weaken and destroy all those institutions relating to corporations, apprenticeships, &c, which cause the labours of agriculture to be worse paid than the labours of trade and manufactures.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter V, paragraph 23, lines 3-7

“Trade unions, governments, business corporations, political parties, and the like are formal structures in the sense that they represent rationally ordered instruments for the achievement of stated goals.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Organization," 1948, p. 25

Business , Sense

“The publication of the book, Corporate Strategy, by H. Igor Ansoff was a major event in the 1965 world of management. As early as it came in this literature, the book represented a kind of crescendo in the development of strategic planning theory, offering a degree of elaboration seldom attempted since.”

Igor Ansoff (1918–2001) American mathematician

Henry Mintzberg (1994), The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Prentice Hall, Hemel Hempstead. p. 43

Books , World , Literature

“I always felt, in looking at [the Cuban] situation, that it was wrong. And I now know why. It came to me one night in Mexico. China is communist, the same as Cuba, and yet we have no problem trading with China. In fact, today we can't get over there quick enough. The difference is simple: China welcomes our corporations. Cuba threw them out. It's a basic decision of corporate America: We will punish Cuba because Castro stuck it to us by nationalizing everything after he came to power. What other reason could there be? China is far more powerful but we now welcome them into global trade with open arms—as we should—while we continue this bitter, hostile policy towards Cuba. It must be because there are still people alive in the corporate world who got hammered by Fidel's revolution.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 6 (p. 111)

Hostility , People , World , Problem

“The corporation was originally conceived as a public institution whose purpose was to serve national interests and advance the public good.”

Joel Bakan (1959) Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 153

“After earning the PhD degree and acquiring some relatively extensive experience in digital computers… It was time to leave the University. The result of an extensive search for the right job was a family move to Arlington Heights, Illinois, where it was a short commute to the Research Laboratories of the Pure Oil Company at Crystal Lake. I was given the title of Mathematical and Computer Consultant. The Labs were set in a beautiful campus, the professional personnel were eager to learn what I had to teach and to include me in many interesting projects where my knowledge and skills could be put to good use. I was encouraged to initiate my own program of research. I went to work with enthusiasm.
The corporate headquarters of Pure Oil were located in down town Chicago. Pure Oil had been trying to install an IBM 705 computer system for all their accounting needs including calculation of all data necessary for the management of exploration, drilling, refining and distribution of oil products and even royalties to shareholders in oil wells. Typical for those early days, the programming team was in deep difficulties and needed help; they lacked adequate resources and suitable training. The Executive Vice President of Pure Oil, when he heard that there was a computer expert already on the payroll at the Crystal Lake lab, ended our family blissful dream and I was reassigned to the down town office.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Systems Movement: Autobiographical Retrospectives (2004)

Family , Beauty , Dreams , Search

“Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life’s routines. It’s the trade-off so that we don’t have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we’d at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn’t matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary. wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.
And then it’s another day.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Life , Fools , Music , Feeling

“The transformations initiated by a healthy vegan diet go well beyond physical health. For those who want it to be, a plant-based diet is also a potent political comment on our broken food system. … we're looking at a diet for which the ultimate beneficiary is the individual. Healthy veganism explicitly serves no corporate or industrial gods. In fact, it counters these interests. … If the prospect of simultaneously giving corporate food executives nightmares while achieving personal dietary empowerment -- not to mention lowering your carbon footprint and minimizing animal suffering -- has any appeal, then veganism is for you.”

James E. McWilliams (1968) American historian

"The Evidence for a Vegan Diet", in The Atlantic (18 January 2012) https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/the-evidence-for-a-vegan-diet/251498/.

God , Health , Food , Suffering

“This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 15
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

Parting

“In America, where many peoples are held together largely by their sense of opportunities and their hope of reward, the subject is of the gravest concern. The attitude and reactions of the native-born American who believes in Americanization, and the one who does not, with all shades of opinion and of feeling lying between the two extremes, are to be considered. There is the man who comes here to stay and the one who in- tends to return. There is the racial solidarist bent upon reestablishing his own race here with as few changes as possible. There is the race which hates another, and for its own independent reasons tries to block its progress in the new land. We have to reckon with a situation created by men who are representatives of powerful foreign corporations, who will spend their lives here, make their homes here, and who never intend to become part of America. There are leaders who manipulate their people in the interest of the country of their origin, as well as those genuinely interested in serving America. In addition, there are factions in each race having no desire to unite with one another; there are races opposed to healing their own differences of centuries ago; and there are groups passionately devoted to their own culture and ideals, to which in their opinion nothing can compare.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Men , Hate , People , Hope

“Job creation as part of the corporate mission, particularly the creation of fll time, decently paid, stable jobs, appears to have taken a back seat in many major corporations, regardless of company profits”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

Source: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999, Chapter Eleven, "Breeding Disloyalty"

Appearance , Time , Parting

“Corporate inversion, they're leaving the United States, we have almost $5 trillion sitting out there, where they can't get the money back, they can't bring it in because there's no mechanism to bring it back in and the tax is so high. I'm going to bring tremendous amounts of money, tremendous amounts of jobs, tremendous numbers of companies, and yes the tax is going to be cut from the highest tax nation anywhere in the world to a fairly low tax. Not the lowest in the world, but to a fairly low tax.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, June

Money , World

“I wish in closing to emphasize how little corporate philanthrophy (the practical meaning of “creative capitalism,” a terrible expression that implies nonaltruistic capitalism is uncreative) is actually philanthropic, in the sense of being driven by altruism rather than by profit maximization.”

Richard A. Posner (1939) United States federal judge

" Against Creative Capitalism, Part Two https://web.archive.org/web/20080821055810/http://creativecapitalism.typepad.com:80/creative_capitalism/2008/08/against-creativ.html" (2008), published in Creative Capitalism: A Conversation with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Other Economic Leaders.

Sense

“A fundamental part of any firm's corporate strategy is its choice of what portfolio of business to compete in. According to the academic literature, this decision should reflect the 'superiority' of related diversification over unrelated diversification… This is because related diversification presumably allows the corporate center to exploit the interrelationships that exist among its different businesses (SBUs) and so achieve cost and/or differentiation competitive advantages over its rivals.”

Constantinos C. Markides (1960) Cypriot business theorist

Source: "Related diversification, core competences and corporate performance", 1994, p. 149

Literature , Business , Decision , Parting

“Moreover, the human condition, if that is what it is, has been getting steadily worse in the Corporate State; more and more life-denying just as life should be opening up.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter IX : The New Generation, p. 220

Life

“The administration, through senior Air Force officials, wants the U. S. to achieve military supremacy in outer space. Dominating all earth from outer space will have an out-of-world price tag, perhaps more than $1 trillion.A question: Why reach for the stars with guns in our hands? Are there weapons of mass destruction on Mars?Yesterday 28 Members of Congress signed on to H. R. 2420, a bill to stop the weaponization of space, urging the President to sign an international treaty to ban such weapons. If we work together towards creating peace on earth, we would not bring war to the high heavens.While some fantasize about being "masters of the universe," there are 45 million Americans without health insurance. Corporations are reneging on pension obligations. Social Security is under attack. We are headed towards a $400 billion annual budget deficit, a $600 billion trade deficit, an $8 trillion national debt. The cost of the war in Iraq is over $200 billion. While we build new bases in Iraq, we close them in the United States.Earth to Washington, D. C. Earth to Washington, D. C. D. C., call home.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressional Record (19 May 2005) http://frwebgate1.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=239723145903+0+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve.

War , Health , World , Peace

“We live in an oligarchic state where we’ve been rendered utterly powerless. The judiciary, the legislative, the executive branch is all subservient to an oligarchic corporate elite. And the press is owned by an oligarchic corporate elite which makes sure that any critique of them is never broadcast over the airwaves.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

interviewed by Paul Jay, “The Pathology of the Super-Rich” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfmiCLYweTQ 4:45

“… the only difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

quoted in American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good (2015)

Source: [Woodard, Colin, American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good, 1980, Simon and Schuster, 0698181719]

“We are a society awash in skillfully manufactured lies. Solitude that makes thought possible—a removal from the electronic cacophony that besieges us—is harder and harder to find. We have severed ourselves from a print-based culture. We are unable to grapple with the nuances and complexity of ideas. We have traded ideas for fabricated clichés. We speak in the hollow language we are given by our corporate masters. Reality, presented to us as image, is unexamined and therefore false. We are culturally illiterate. And because of our cultural illiteracy we are easily manipulated and controlled.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Speech at the American Political Science Association, September 3, 2016 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_intellectuals_we_abandon_20160904

Idea , Reality , Solitude , Falseness

“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 (1935) American journalist

Washington Rain Dance, p. 17
Waiting For The Barbarians (1997)

Business

“[On his work appearing on the Internet] It's a conflicted feeling. I'm really a populist, down in the very center of me. I like the power people can accrue for themselves, and I like the idea of user-generated content and taking power from the corporations. The other half of the conflict, though, is that, traditionally speaking, artists are protected from copyright infringement. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about solving this issue. It's someone else's job.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Las Vegas CityLife, August 9, 2007 http://www.lvcitylife.com/articles/2007/08/10/ae/stage/iq_15893857.txt
Interviews, Print Interviews

People , Feeling , Idea , Appearance

“Post-war Labour ideology in Britain has reached the end of the road. We tried the state (1945), we tried the market (1997), then we tried them both together (2007) and Britain is still not generating value in anything other than financial services and high end university teaching and research. Paradoxically, both sectors are protected by the two most ancient, and most democratic self-governing institutions left in the country. Cambridge University on the one side and the City of London Corporation on the other. It is time for our socialist tradition to rediscover the social.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Blue Labour, The Profundity of Defeat http://www.bluelabour.org/2013/10/30/285/

War , Universe , Time , Country

“But what is meant by “flesh” (σάρξ)? It is not what is corporal or sensual but rather the whole sphere of what is visible, available, disposable, and measurable, and as such the sphere of what is transient. This sphere becomes a power over us insofar as we make it the foundation of our lives by living “according to it,” that is, by succumbing to the temptation to live out of what is visible and disposable instead of out of what is invisible and nondisposable—regardless of whether we give ourselves to the alluring possibilities of such a life imprudently and with desire or whether we lead our lives reflectively and with calculation on the basis of our own accomplishments, “the works of the law.” “Flesh” embraces not only material things but also all of our creating and accomplishing insofar as it is concerned with achieving something demonstrable such as fulfilling the demands of the law (Gal. 3:3); to “flesh” belongs every achieved quality and every advantage that we can have within the sphere of what can be seen and disposed of”

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976) German theologian

Phil. 3:4ff.
Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 16

Life , Law

“The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

quoted in "The Prospects of Recording" by Glenn Gould, The Glenn Gould reader, 1984, p. 345
1980s

“This administration is not sympathetic to corporations, it is indentured to corporations.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

Quoted in a news conference (3 October 1972), speaking on the Nixon Administration; reported in The Washington Post (4 October 1972), p. A2.

“So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Interview "Milton Friedman Responds" in Chemtech (February 1974) p. 72.

Money , Law , Question , Business

“[The corporation is an invaluable auxiliary to the conduct of foreign affairs by the Government, and] has become an international as well as a national instrument. It is a mighty institution which thus far has not become, and has manifested no great desire to become, an independent political force. In international life it is an experiment in non-national organization, pledged only to discharge certain economic functions.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

163 ; as cited in Prashker (1954)
The 20th century capitalist revolution. 1954

Life

“The best company management is one that combines a sense of corporate greatness and destiny, with empathy for - and fidelity to - the average employee.”

David Packard (1912–1996) American electrical engineer, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, businessman, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense,…

Source: Bill & Dave, 2007, p. 393

Sense

“In the public sphere, perception is reality: it's more important to be seen to do something than actually to do it. At least when private companies use PR and advertising they must spend their own money and there are other corporations vying for our business. If a company doesn't give us what we want they face bankruptcy. Public institutions, however, are monopolies. We have no choice but to buy, if not use, their services. If we don't like the way our particular police force operates it's not like we can choose another one or even withhold the money used to run the one we don't like. We're forced - under threat of imprisonment - to pay for a monopoly service and for it to tell us how great it is. This is the real danger of institutional PR. In the absence of competition it is only through a diversity of opinion and public scrutiny that some level of accountability can exist. PR stifles debate and suppresses opinion through the use of centralized press offices and communication protocols.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Pages 45-46.
The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy, 1st Edition

Money , Way , Communication , Business

“This pioneer work, written for both the professional economist and the businessman, has become a classic in its field. It is a detailed examination of the structure of the large business corporation in relation to its actual economic functioning. Because Gordon views the corporation not as an external institution but as organized human activity, his emphasis is on the personal and volitional elements in leadership, or how businessmen actually shape their practices. His analysis is based on a formidable mass of case material and statistical data”

Robert Aaron Gordon (1908–1978) American economist

Abstract
Business Leadership in the Large Corporation (1945)

Business , Personality

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

This quote spread rapidly in the United States after appearing in a column by Molly Ivins (24 November 2002). It is repeated often and sometimes attributed to the "Fascism" entry in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana. However hard copies of the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana exist in numerous libraries and the alleged quote is not in the text, nor is there anything that would support the alleged quote. A vaguely similar statement does appear in Doctrine of Fascism.
We are, in other words, a state which controls all forces acting in nature. We control political forces, we control moral forces, we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state.
The same document explains that the "corporations" (corporazioni) on which the Fascist state rested were its own creations, modeled on guild associations and not private companies, which Italian normally calls società. For details see "Mussolini on the Corporate State" http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html by Chip Berlet.
Attributed

“We lost -- we lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger. We lost their trust when instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties -- and Sen. Obama -- passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies. We lost their trust when we valued our power over our principles. We're going to change that.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2000s, 2008, (2008)

People , Change , Dependency

“Whether you are carving a statue or reorganizing a corporation, you have a vision of what you want to create, as well as a sense of how to make that vision real by bringing different elements together according to an overall pattern… And just as artists communicate their intent through their works, managers must be able to convey their vision in an inspiring and forceful way - in other words to lead - or else that vision will never be fully realized.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

As cited in: Elizabety A Dreyer (1996) "Excellence in the Profession." Theological Education Vol 33. Nr. 1. (Autumn 1996). p. 11.
The liberal arts and the art of management (1987)

Way , Communication , Sense

“The Trusts and Corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous energy. They were revolutionary, troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring. They tore society to pieces and trampled it under foot.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

School , Parting

“For the Muslim, religion traditionally was not only universal but also central in the sense that it constituted the essential basis and focus of identity and loyalty. It was religion which distinguished those who belonged to the group and marked them off from those outside the group. A Muslim Iraqi would feel far closer bonds with a non-Iraqi Muslim than with a non-Muslim Iraqi. Muslims of different countries, speaking different languages, share the same memories of a common and sacred past, the same awareness of corporate identity, the same sense of a common predicament and destiny. It is not nation or country which, as in the West, forms the historic basis of identity, but the religio-political community, and the imported Western idea of ethnic and territorial nationhood remains, like secularism, alien and incompletely assimilated.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Return of Islam (1976)

Religion , Feeling , Communication , Idea

“The term “Spirituality” as it is expressed in books of Kabbalah, means that it is devoid of any corporeal contingency, meaning time, space, imagination, and so on. Sometimes, this term indicates only the Ohr Elyon (lit. Upper Light) in the Kli (lit. Vessel), although a Kli is also completely spiritual in every way.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, What is Spirituality?

Books , Way , Imagination , Light

“My old lip color could barely keep up with my busy schedule. In the time it takes to notice the wide discrepancy between my salary and that of my male peers, I'd have to reapply! In the seconds to count the number of women in high political office, seated on corporate executive boards and featured in film and television over the age of 40, my lip color would be as invisible as this glass ceiling only inches above my head! L'Oreal. Because I am worth it. And because holding myself to an impossible standard of beauty keeps me from starting a riot!”

Maria Bamford (1970) American actress and comedian

How to WIN! (2006)

Women , Age , Beauty , Color

“Government is humbug. There is no government. Behind the noisy, smoke-belching, larger-than-life illusion of government are ordinary human beings. It isn't accurate to say government 'is composed of' people; government is simply people. They may be good people but they are very bad wizards. Mortals have no magic. Individuals are the only human reality. All groups are fictions. That is, groups have no concrete existence; they are not beings or entities in themselves; they exist only in the abstract, in the mind. Governments, nations, societies, classes, tribes, cub scout packs, football teams, corporations, labor unions, proletariats, political parties, majorities, elite minorities, communities, civilizations and such are all fictions. Those words only describe, or try to describe, a relationship between persons.”

Roger Lea MacBride (1929–1995) American writer, TV producer, and politician; 1976 Libertarian Party candidate for President

A New Dawn for America : The Libertarian Challenge (1976) p. 16

Life , People , Communication , Reality

“Like it or not, giant, vertically integrated corporate enterprises were the most efficient means of organizing the production and distribution of mass produced goods and services. Bringing together supply chains, production processes, and distribution channels in vertically integrated companies under centralized management dramatically reduced transaction costs, increased efficiencies and productivity, lowered the marginal cost of production and distribution, and, for the most part, lowered the price of goods and services to consumers, allowing the economy to flourish. While those at the top of the corporate pyramid disproportionately benefited from the increasing returns on investment, it’s only fair to acknowledge that the lives of millions of consumers also improved appreciably in industrialized nations.”

Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)

Parting

“A triumphalist corporate capitalism, free at last of the specter of Communism, has mobilized its economic power to relentlessly marginalize all nonmarket values; to subordinate every aspect of American life to corporate "efficiency" and the bottom line; to demonize not only government but the very idea of public service and public goods.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Dreaming of War" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/willis, The Nation (15 October 2001)

Life , Communication , Idea

“Driven by this basic profit-above-all-else directive, corporations are mandated, in effect, to “grow or die,” a rule also called “the growth imperative.” Of course, a food maker is no different from any other corporation operating in a free economy. However, food companies face special challenges when it comes to obeying the market's growth imperative: because there's a limit—in theory, anyway—to the number of calories humans can consume, competition is especially fierce among food makers for the finite pool of money that consumers can spend.”

Michele Simon (1965) public health lawyer

Source: Appetite for Profit (2006), p. 5

Money , Food

“The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella’s fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father’s best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime.”

Ian McDonald book Desolation Road

Source: Desolation Road (1988), Chapter 47 (p. 238).

“But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply, so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface, overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship. All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted partly in groups, partly en masse at the close—a distinction which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy, is said to have introduced. The interchange of letters of courtesy was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy; "friendly" letters flew over land and sea between persons who had neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter is addressed to a corporation. In like manner invitations to dinner, the customary new year's presents, the domestic festivals, were divested of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials; even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions to his countless "neighbours," but in order to die with due respectability he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake. Just as in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Pt. 2, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
On Roman Friendship in the last ages of the Republic.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Life , Death , Friendship , War

“Recent biblical exegesis by Anthem’s newest organization, Hermeneutics Unlimited, had established beyond doubt that Jesus Christ was adamantly opposed to universal health-care insurance, class-action lawsuits, and corporate whistleblowers. Several prominent postrationalist theologians had successfully exposed public education for the misguided Marxist boondoggle it was, while a majority in Congress now advocated replacing the secular school system with private academies committed to sparing children the bad news that Charles Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 13 (p. 292)

Children , Health , Education , School

“Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis. But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts… We have a subprime financial system, not a subprime mortgage market.”

Nouriel Roubini (1958) American economist

Quoted in Stephen Mihm, "Dr. Doom," http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/magazine/17pessimist-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin The New York Times (2008-08-15).

People , Home , Problem

“One day stores will no longer have gender classifications. Instead the consumer decides how and what they want, rather than the social engineering of corporations. The concept of gender will be extinct.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Speaking at Women's march in Los Angeles (21 January 2017).

“We all know that the besetting danger of Churches is formalism; the besetting danger of State action, of corporate action, is officialism and mechanism; and we all know that it is a drawback to many modern ideals that they rest upon materialism and a soulless secularism.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech opening the Passmore Edwards Settlement (12 February 1898), quoted in 'Mr. Morley On Social Settlements', The Times (14 February 1898), p. 12.

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations which grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Respectfully Quoted says this is "obviously spurious", noting that the OED's earliest citation for the word "deflation" is from 1920. The earliest known appearance of this quote is from 1935 (Testimony of Charles C. Mayer, Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives, Seventy-fourth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 5357, p. 799)
Misattributed

Children , People

“The larger the corporation, the greater the risk that you are flying blind.”

Patrick Dixon book Futurewise

Futurewise (1998)

Flying

“Recently I asked three corporate executives what decisions they had made in the last year that they would not have made were it not for their corporate plans. All had difficulty in identifying one such decision. Since each of their plans were marked 'secret' or 'confidential', I asked them how their competitors might benefit from the possession of their plans. Each answered with embarrassment that their competitors would not benefit. Yet these executives were strong advocates of corporate planning.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, A concept of corporate planning, 1969, p. 1 as cited in: Henry Mintzberg (1994) Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. p. 98.

Secret , Decision , Strong

“A corporate raid on a country is not foreign investment. It's just a corporate raid. A corporate raid doesn't expand our wealth, our employment, our exports, is not advantageous to most economies and most economies understand that. In New Zealand we did not. Everything that came from overseas was regarded as foreign investment, when, in fact, it was often a downsizing of the operation, a break-up of the operation and a mass of sackings.”

Winston Peters (1945) New Zealand politician

Interview with the 7:30 Report, ABC TV, Australia.

Understanding , Country , Wealth

“The widespread assumption that big business and big government are fundamentally at odds, and that big business supports a free market, serves to maintain the ruling partnership in power; indeed, ‘vulgar liberalism’ and ‘vulgar libertarianism’ (in Carson’s sense) represent the dominant ideologies of the establishment left and establishment right, respectively. The establishment left disguises its government intervention on behalf of the rich as government intervention on behalf of the poor, while the right disguises its government intervention on behalf of the rich as an opposition to government intervention per se – and each side has an interest in maintaining the myth propagated by its nominal opponent. For those who are repelled by the realities of corporate capitalism are lured into becoming opponents of the free market and foot soldiers for the left wing of the ruling class, while those who are attracted by free-market ideals are lured into becoming defenders of corporate capitalism and foot soldiers for the right wing of the ruling class. Either way, the partnership as a whole has its power reinforced.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

Source: "Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice" (2012), p. 422

Way , Business , Support , Reality

“Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable.”

Joel Bakan (1959) Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 25

“In point of material wealth and resources, we are greatly in advance of them. The taxable property of the Confederate States cannot be less than twenty-two hundred millions of dollars! This, I think I venture but little in saying, may be considered as five times more than the colonies possessed at the time they achieved their independence. Georgia, alone, possessed last year, according to the report of our comptroller-general, six hundred and seventy-two millions of taxable property. The debts of the seven confederate States sum up in the aggregate less than eighteen millions, while the existing debts of the other of the late United States sum up in the aggregate the enormous amount of one hundred and seventy-four millions of dollars. This is without taking into account the heavy city debts, corporation debts, and railroad debts, which press, and will continue to press, as a heavy incubus upon the resources of those States. These debts, added to others, make a sum total not much under five hundred millions of dollars. With such an area of territory as we have-with such an amount of population-with a climate and soil unsurpassed by any on the face of the earth-with such resources already at our command-with productions which control the commerce of the world-who can entertain any apprehensions as to our ability to succeed, whether others join us or not?”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

World , Thinking , Time , Wealth

“A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological ‘disconnectors’, even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this ‘non-corporal’ penalty.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold

Life , Pain , Penalty , Feeling

“Governments, corporations and assorted others regularly exploit the idea that tribal peoples are "primitive" in order to remove them from their land or open it up to outsiders, thereby freeing up access to the natural resources on or under their land. Often this is done in the name of "development", justified on the grounds that the so-called "primitive" tribes are backward and out-of-date and need to "catch up" with the rest of us. But what are the consequences? For the tribes, they are almost always catastrophic: cultural and spiritual alienation, poverty, alcoholism, disease and death.”

Stephen Corry (1951) British anthropologist and activist

Don't call these people primitive http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/stephen-corry-dont-call-these-people-primitive-1633333.html, The Independent 27 February 2009

Death , People , Alcohol , Disease

“I see no reason why children as young as six, seven, or even three shouldn't be allowed to produce corporate comic books to relentless monthly deadlines. And have to write several titles at once to make a decent living. That's what a proper childhood's all about isn't it? This is the 21st century after all and these unruly little bastards have been milking post-Victorian sentimentality for all it's worth for way too long. Time to get kids back where they belong - up chimneys, down mines, and tied to the printing presses! If you can pick up a brick to smash a car window, then you can build me a textile factory, son … here's a whole half dollar for your day's labor. Now put down that Justin Timberlake bio-comic and get back on the production line!”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2003
http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=001597
On comics

Children , Books , Cars , Way

“By leveraging their freedom from the bonds of location, corporations could now dictate the economic policy of governments.”

Joel Bakan (1959) Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 22

Freedom

“The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual … cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”

Edward Said (1935–2003) Professor of English and literature

Representation of the Intellectual http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gmx4c (1994)

People , Question , Thinking , Sense

“In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees,—in a higher or lower grade,—of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Section I: “The Old Order Changeth”, p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA5&dq=%22In%20most%20parts%20of%20our%20country%22
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

Men , Way , Business , Time

“From the moment we become old enough to want to own ourselves, the corporate cast of womanhood is stamped into our subconscious, burnt into our brains, reminding us that we are cattle, that we are chattel, that we must strive for conformity, that we can never be free. Not everything begins with sex, but this book does.”

Laurie Penny book Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

Introduction
Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2010)

Books , Sex

“…another cause of today’s instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility and have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

World

“Punk: [after hearing John Laurinaitis propose a WWE Championship match at Survivor Series against Alberto Del Rio] Okay, pardon me for not being all smiles, that's exactly what I want, but… what's the catch? You gonna make it a handicap match, or is Ricardo Rodriguez the special guest referee? No, are you gonna be the special guest ring announcer with your majestic voice?
Laurinaitis: Punk, there's only one thing you have to do.
Punk: There's one thing I have to do… for you. I have to do something for you to get a title shot? Let me guess—I gotta re-grip your skateboard, you need new ball bearings?
Laurinaitis: You know what, Punk? I know you don't like me, okay? And that's okay. I'm not playing the part of Executive Vice President of Talent Relations, I am the Executive Vice President of Talent Relations and the General Manager of Raw. So in order for me to make it official, you need to tell me in front of the WWE Universe that you respect me. Tell me that you respect me.
Punk: Are you Aretha Franklin? You want me to tell these people I respect you when I know clearly that you don't respect me 'cause I don't wear a bourgeois suit and I don't tow the company line? You wanna talk about respect? Respect, Johnny, is earned, it isn't just given. And you're gonna come out here and say that when you're in charge, this place… this place is just oh so run like a tight ship. Have you watched the product? We've got rings collapsing, you got Kevin Nash interfering in every other match of mine; this place isn't any better with you in charge. How's that for respect?
Laurinaitis: Punk, you're about to make a big mistake. Okay, swallow your pride, stand up like a man, and tell me that you respect me.
Punk: Okay. All right. Don't get hot. [Imitating Laurinaitis] I respect you, Funk-man. That all right? Was that good enough?
Laurinaitis: I tell you what, Punk. You've got one more chance to show me and tell me you respect me, and I mean it.
Punk: Okay, Mr. Laurinaitis, sir, Executive Vice President of Talent Relations and interim Raw General Manager. I respect you. I respect the fact that each week, you come out here in front of the millions of fans in the WWE Universe, live on the USA Network, with this awesome, completely lost deer-in-the-headlights look on your face; I respect the fact that you don't know how close to hold the microphone to your mouth when you speak; I respect the fact that you used to compete in this ring with your awesome Kentucky waterfall mullet, and you were never any good, but you somehow still ascended to the top of the WWE corporate structure, showing the world new-found levels of brown-nosery; but above all, I respect the fact that never before in this business has somebody with so little done so much! I respect you! How's that sound?! Does that sound good enough for you?!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

October 24, 2011
WWE Raw

People , World , Smile , Business

“We want to see measures to implement taxation justice for ordinary working people. We want an end to the policy of many years now, of huge tax concessions for big corporations and a plethora of stealth taxes on ordinary families and ordinary working people.”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

In November 2003. breakingnews.ie http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/higgins-mccreevy-must-deliver-tax-justice-in-budget-123560.html

People , Family , Justice

“I could see the room dividing as I spoke. I could hear the laughter of some and louder still silence of others. I realised that for some people this was regarded as an event with import. The magazine, the sponsors and some of those in attendance saw it as a kind of ceremony that warranted respect. In effect, it is a corporate ritual, an alliance between a media organisation, GQ, and a commercial entity, Hugo Boss. What dawned on me as the night went on is that even in apparently frivolous conditions the establishment asserts control, and won't tolerate having that assertion challenged, even flippantly, by that most beautifully adept tool: comedy.”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

Russell Brand - The Guardian (2013)

People , Laughter , Silence , Night

“The most powerful way to prevail in global competition is still invisible to many companies. During the 1980s, top executives were judged on their ability to restructure, declutter, and delayer their corporations. In the 1990s, they'll be judged on their ability to identify, cultivate, and exploit the core competencies that make growth possible - indeed, they'll have to rethink the concept of the corporation itself.”

Gary Hamel (1954) American management expert

Source: "The Core Competence of the Corporation," 1990, p. 2; Lead paragraph

Way

“There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Life-Line

Life-Line (p. 25)
Short fiction, The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)

Law , History , Support , Change

“We will argue that the long-run value of a related diversification lies not so much in the exploitation of economies of scope (asset amortization) - where the benefit is primarily short-term - but in allowing corporations to more cost efficiently expand their stocks of strategic assets. Relatedness, which opens the way for asset improvement, asset creation and asset fission, holds the key to the long-run competitive advantages of diversification. This means that in most cases, similarities in the processes by which strategic assets are expanded and new assets are created are more important than static similarities between the strategic assets that are the outcome of these processes.”

Constantinos C. Markides (1960) Cypriot business theorist

Source: "Related diversification, core competences and corporate performance", 1994, p. 150

Way

“Corporate planning cycles are a classic example of generals fighting the last ware over again instead of preparing for what might lie ahead.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.84

Lie , Fight

“By public administration is meant, in common usage, the activities of the executive branches of national, state, and local governments; independent boards and commissions set up by the congress and state legislatures; government corporations, and certain agencies of a specialized character. Specifically excluded are judicial and legislative agencies within the government and nongovernmental administration.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1940s-1950s, Public administration, 1950, p. 7

“Given the extensive involvement of state violence in the process by which the corporate elite not only achieved its wealth in the past but continues to maintain and augment it in the present, it is clear that the massive inequalities of wealth that characterise present-day “capitalist” society are radically inconsistent with any approach to justice in holdings that is even remotely Nozickian.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

Source: "Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice" (2012), p. 425

Justice , Past , Wealth

“I ought at least to have made corporal. But I never did. Know why? Because the sergeant we had was tough. Because I wouldn't roll over. Jesus, I hate that stuff. I can't stand it. Though—I don't know. Some queers I really liked. As long as they didn't try anything. The most worthwhile friend I ever had, really sensitive and intelligent, he turned out to be queer.”

Truman Capote book In Cold Blood

Perry Smith, part 2
In Cold Blood (1965)

Hate , Intelligence

“Corporations! It's like there are these gigantic monsters living among us, and we don't mind that they're monsters because when we look at them they smile and hand us cheeseburgers. That's nuts.”

Max Barry (1973) Australian writer

Great Writing interview

Smile

“Your Senate Committee on Finance conducted two budget hearings on this matter, Mr. President, to gain a more thorough knowledge on the various projects involved in this measure. All national government agencies and government-owned or controlled corporations that shall implement the said projects served as resource persons for the consecutive hearings.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the Supplemental Appropriations for FY 2014

Knowledge , Personality

“Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs, the world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behavior.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

The I in the Triangle, speech held at a bookstore in Santa Cruz, California (1990)

World , Behavior , Nature , Time

“Most of us are aware and despairing on some level that our lives have become de-eroticized, that love and romance are not all around us but have to be hunted for with the kind of desperation that people used to bring when they went west looking for gold. But the answers that society gives us for this sexual desert are Viagra and Cialis and Levitra, products that allow us to stay hard for hours as we hump the indifferent mannequins we run into in bars. The country is lonely, self-obsessed and the individual members of the population are offered a thousand ways to improve their individual appearance and vigor. But there seems to be no solution on the horizon that anyone is offering to bring us more together, to give us the things we really need — love and acceptance and community.
We blame corporate America for this state of affairs because this ideology of individual acquisitiveness is the religion it naturally preaches. But it's our failure to come up with a competing ideology of getting along that's the real problem.”

Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist

"Finding Love in Electoral Politics", AlterNet (13 November 2004) http://web.archive.org/web/20041117195414/http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/20486/

Love , People , Religion , Way

“The highest part of the human soul, which is called the intelligence and which is not the act of any body and does not need for its proper operation a corporeal instrument—this intelligence, if it were not obscured and weighed down by the mass of the body, would itself have complete knowledge from the irradiation received from the superior light without the help of sense, just as it will have when the soul is drawn forth from the body, and as perhaps those people have who are free from the love and the imaginings of corporeal things.”

Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) English bishop and philosopher

Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros (c. 1217-1220)

Love , People , Soul , Imagination

“In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance with the complex cases of the real world. Such writing does not have to be very exact or quantitative; it does not even have to formulate or to demonstrate hypotheses. It constitutes, as it were, travel over the field of study. Travel is certainly not enough, even for a geographer, but we would feel, I imagine, that a geographer who had never travelled would be under a serious handicap. Similarly the student of organizations who has never, even vicariously through reading, been in a hospital, a bank, a research laboratory, a large corporation, a Soviet factory, a revolution, an Egyptian civil service department, and so on, has missed something. His generalizations are apt to be based on too narrow a selection of the field.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1958) "Evidences for an Administrative Science: A review of the Administrative Science Quarterly, volumes 1 and 2". In Administrative Science Quarterly. vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1-22.as cited in: John Van Maanen (1998) Qualitative Studies of Organizations. p.xx
1950s

World , Travel , Feeling , Imagination

“…organized labor…rushes to support the party without demanding a turn away from corporatism toward workers’ needs. This is the logic of the lesser of two evils. It tethers labor to a relentless slide deeper into the corporate power pits year after year.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

Green Party presidential candidacy speech (2000), Crashing the Party (2002)

Support , Evil

“The contention that control over the instruments of production is everywhere undergoing a shift, away from the capitalists proper and toward the managers, will seem to many fantastic and naive, especially if we are thinking in the first instance of the United States. Consider, it will be argued, the growth of monopoly in our times, Think of the Sixty Families, with their billions upon billions of wealth, their millions of shares of stock in the greatest corporations, and their lives which exceed in luxury and display anything even dreamed of by the rulers of past ages. The managers, even the chief of them, are only the servants, the bailiffs of the Sixty Families. How absurd to call the servant, master!”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Source: The Managerial Revolution, 1941, p. 29, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 13

Age , Family , Dreams , Thinking

“My big problem with corporate structure is this bizarre sense of loyalty you're supposed to feel -- towards what is basically a virus. It grows or dies, like any virus. And you use it for your own selfish ends.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

source http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10464376/radioheads_thom_yorke_on_going_solo/2
On the record industry.

Feeling , Problem , Sense , Loyalty

“My generation has no intention of living as serfs on a corporate manor, Dad. When people became more reliant on multinational corporations than on their own communities, they surrendered whatever say they had in their government. Corporations are growing stronger while democratic government becomes increasingly helpless.”

Daniel Suarez book Freedom™

Source: Freedom™ (2010), Chapter 10: Corn Rebellion, Character: Jenna Fossen

People , Communication

“This is a struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party, which in too many cases has become so corporate and identified with corporate interests that you can't tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Interview with Judy Woodruff, Inside Politics, CNN (17 February 2003) http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0302/17/ip.00.html.

Soul

“Not only have material wealth and the possibilities for freeing mankind definitively from the burden of meaningless, repetitive and mechanical work increased, but so too has the polarization of society between fewer and fewer owners of capital and more and more workers of hand and brain, forced to sell their labour-power to these owners. The concentration of wealth and power in a small number of giant industrial and financial corporations has brought with it an increasingly universal struggle between Capital and Labour.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

Universe , Wealth

“Our 'overhead' expense in segregating the delinquent, the defective and the dependent, in prisons, asylums and permanent homes, our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying … demonstrate our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism. No industrial corporation could maintain its existence upon such a foundation. Yet hardheaded 'captains of industry,' financiers who pride themselves upon their cool-headed and keen-sighted business ability are dropping millions into rosewater philanthropies and charities that are silly at best and vicious at worst. In our dealings with such elements there is a bland maladministration and misuse of huge sums that should in all righteousness be used for the development and education of the healthy elements of the community.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Source: The Pivot of Civilization, 1922, Chapter 12, "Woman and the Future"

Education , Home , Communication , Failure

“The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law.
Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiraling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 7, “Liz: Black Swans” (pp. 82-83)

Education , Law , Food , Communication

“I am very proud to have worked with the BBC for 30 years. I had hoped to continue to work for the corporation but that is no longer possible.”

Mark Tully (1935) British journalist

Source: Peter Victor, " Tully quits BBC http://www.independent.co.uk/news/tully-quits-bbc-1412865.html," The Independent, 10 July 1994

Hope

“What is the "cost of capital" to a, firm in a world in which funds are used to acquire assets whose yields are uncertain; and in which capital can be obtained by many different media, ranging from pure debt instruments, representing money-fixed claims, to pure equity issues, giving holders only the right to a pro-rata share in the uncertain venture? This question has vexed at least three classes of economists: (1) the corporation finance specialist concerned with the techniques of financing firms so as to ensure their survival and growth; (2) the managerial economist concerned with capital budgeting; and (3) the economic theorist concerned with explaining investment behavior at both the micro and macro levels.”

Merton Miller (1923–2000) American economist

Franco Modigliani and Merton H. Miller. "The cost of capital, corporation finance and the theory of investment." The American economic review (1958): 261-297.

Money , World , Behavior , Question

“The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 9, p. 258

“You will see that our strategy is clear. It is to reorganise the functions of Government, to leave more to individual or to corporate effort, to make savings in Government expenditure, to provide room for greater incentives to men and women and to firms and businesses. Our strategy is to encourage them more and more to take their own decisions, to stand on their own feet, to accept responsibility for themselves and for their families.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (10 October 1970), quoted in John Campbell, Edward Heath (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), p. 310.
Prime Minister

Women , Men , Family , Business

“Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Also it is the attempt to expose the ways our philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions perform their primary function, which is to rationalize or naturalize — make seem natural — the domination that pervades our way of life: the destruction of the natural world or of indigenous peoples, for example, comes not from the result of decisions actively made and actions pursued, but instead, so we convince ourselves, as a manifestation of Darwinian selection, or God's will, or economic exigency. Beyond that, Anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as part of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination over others… Most fundamentally, I would see Anarchism as a synonym for anti-authoritarianism.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

Life , God , People , World

Quotes about corporal page 6

Quotes about corporal
page 6