Corporate Greed Quotes

To enter the corporate rat race, you need to become a rat. ~ Lakshmy Menon Chatterjee

In the 1980s and 1990s, Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, laid off over 100,000 employees. His reward? When he retired from GE, he received a golden parachute of over $400 million dollars. This is the kind of corporate greed and irresponsibility that is destroying the middle class and must be ended. ~ Bernie Sanders

The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it. ~ Annie Proulx

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.
(Defy the Space That Separates, The Nation, October 7, 1996) ~ Adrienne Rich

The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power. ~ Eric Schlosser

Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped "the company." I've never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that's the way it will be. That's the way it always is. ~ Octavia E. Butler

Ideology that believes government is bad, and that public institutions and places are not valuable, is as destructive as corporate greed. ~ Cynthia Dill

The privileged individuals and families who comprise the global elite will happily bankrupt their own countrymen, decimate their own community and evict their neighbors from houses in their desperate bid to increase their wealth. ~ James Morcan

Over a decade of citywide rezonings, land speculations, and corporate bidding wars for available commercial space has produced a Darwinian habitat where corporate retail proliferates, and where mom-and-pops have become an endangered species. ~ Alessandro Busà

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation? ~ Barry Lopez

You would be surprised at how many corporations "none of your business" applies to! ~ Steven Magee

Liability limit has become a symbol of corporate greed in passing the risk of disaster to the U.S. government and U.S. citizens. ~ Marvin Ammori

The only thing that stands between corporate greed and poverty is the union. ~ Lee Whitnum

I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well. ~ Eleanor Catton

People who foster dependence on illicit drugs such as heroin are regarded among the most unscrupulous pariahs of modern civilisation. In contrast, pushers of licit drugs tend to be viewed as altruistically motivated purveyors of social good. ~ John Braithwaite

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. ~ Suzy Kassem

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. There I agree with Milton Friedman [right-wing economist] and those guys: if you're a C.E.O., you must do that―otherwise you're in dereliction of duty, in fact dereliction of duty. And besides that, if you don't do it, you'll get kicked out by the shareholders or the Board of Directors, and you won't be there very long anyway. ~ Noam Chomsky

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms - greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge - has marked the upward surge of mankind. (Gordon Gekko, in Wall Street. ~ Sidney Sheldon

To put it in Quaker terms, my inner light flickered a lot, like the overhead fluorescent at a Motel 6, and sometimes, it burnt out altogether. The closest I came to consistent faith was during my senior year religion class, when we learned about the Central and South American liberation theology movements and I became briefly convinced that God was a left-wing superhero who led the global struggle against imperialism and corporate greed. Sort of a celestial Michael Moore. ~ Kevin Roose

Enforcement isn't about big government or small government. It's about whether government works and who it works for. ~ Elizabeth Warren

Do you hear that, Dillon? Inadvertent self-wedgie! Write that down! That's what you want your characters to say, not some anodyne bullshit about corporate greed. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Contemporary Christians have declared war on individual immorality but seem remarkably silent about the evil of systems, especially corporate greed and malfeasance. (p. 176) ~ Robin R. Meyers

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. ~ Diane Ravitch

When the greedy executives of rich religions go before Him, they will say, "Remember me for who I was." And God will answer, "I do remember but you have forgotten who you use to be. ~ Shannon L. Alder

One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organised religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion. ~ Trent Reznor

It's time for the wealthy to pay their fair share before the middle class becomes the forgotten class.- And it's time for the banks to give back what they were given. There are those in politics, particularly those on the conservative side, who can't get enough of telling people that the wealthy one per cent must not be taxed because doing so kills jobs. The real job-killers are corporate greed and political expediency. It's time for working people in Maine and all across the country to take back the American dream. ~ Stephen King

Koch's youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. ~ John Charles Chasteen

Corporate greed controls political will. ~ Aaron B. Powell

More and more people are saying 'no' to government lies, corporate greed, and a slavish media.

The silenced majority is finding its voice. ~ Amy Goodman

The corporate system is interconnected and now share a common invested interest, the ability to control through business, the people. It is an inevitable path the parameters set will take the beast down following the easiest way to collective profits, to control the ones that provide them. It is also logical to protect your own, from ones that are shedding light through Art on the grey water they may have stepped into to reach their fullest profit potentials. It is the logical solution to what would be, just business. So the Matrix story albeit written to lift for all the ceiling of what is possible, has inevitably shined a light on the entire path that was chosen and the pre-chosen road ahead that collective corporations were on creating a separate state of politically connected elite and those seeking award through serving them. A natural progression of what was set in place from the beginning. The flaw was in the design of the collective corporate system, globally intertwined now, and immersed in politics, protecting its own, making the question real this time, how to balance the equation. ~ Tom Althouse

One fact is beyond dispute: Homogenization prevents the consumer from realizing just how little fat is contained in modern processed milk, even "full fat" milk. Before homogenization, milk purchasers looked for milk that had lots of cream - that was the sign that the milk came from healthy cows, cows on pasture. Old-fashioned milk contained from 4 to 8 percent butterfat, which translated into lots of cream on the top. Modern milk is standardize at 3.5 percent, no more. Butterfat brings bigger profits to the dairy industry as butter or as an ingredient in ice cream than as a component of liquid milk. The consumer has been cheated, but with homogenization, he can't tell. ~ Ron Schmid

We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions. ~ Cornel West

I feel terrible about corporate greed. Growing up in a household that was a little more humble and didn't put so much emphasis on money and material goods, I think I have a pretty good head on my shoulders. ~ Chloe Sevigny

How many times have such meetings been held throughout American history? How many times have men. be they private prison executives or convict lessees, gotten together to perform this ritual? They sit in company headquarters or legislative offices, far from their prisons or labor camps, and craft stories that soothe their consciences. They convince themselves, with remarkable ease, that they are in the business of punishment because it makes the world better, not because it makes them rich. ~ Shane Bauer

Corporate greed is killing America, and that's what we battling at Boeing. ~ Bill Johnson

You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball - why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they'd run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding. ~ Clifford D. Simak

The Establishment is amassing wealth and aggressively annexing power in a way that has no precedent in modern times. After all, there is nothing to stop it. ~ Owen Jones

Then, in the 1980's, came the paroxysm of downsizing, and the very nature of the corporation was thrown into doubt. In what began almost as a fad and quickly matured into an unshakable habit, companies were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' and generally cutting as many jobs as possible, white collar as well as blue ... The New York Times captured the new corporate order succintly in 1987, reporting that it 'eschews loyalty to workers, products, corporate structures, businesses, factories, communities, even the nation. All such allegiances are viewed as expendable under the new rules. With survival at stake, only market leadership, strong profits and a high stock price can be allowed to matter'. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Think of the things killing us as a nation: narcotic drugs, brainless competition, dishonesty, greed, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all
lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy
all of these are addictions of dependent personalities. That is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce. ~ John Taylor Gatto

This congregation of displaced persons had been brought together at a moment in time, in this room, by a few irrevocable mistakes of the past - those acts of rage, greed, lust, and revenge that ran like silent films in their heads, the actors driven by emotions that had gone cold and were now inexplicable. ~ V.S. Kemanis

Since human needs are finite, but human greed is not, economic growth can usually be maintained through artificial creation of needs by means of advertising. The goods that are produced and sold in this way are often unneeded, and thus are essentially waste. The pollution and depletion of natural resources generated by this enormous waste of unnecessary goods is exacerbated by the waste of energy and materials in inefficient production processes. Indeed, as we discuss in Chapter 17, the ~ Fritjof Capra

Leaving traces of ourselves, as in creative productivity, could then be seen as part of the definition of consciousness for us as well. We know that in order to progress we must stretch for something just out of reach
if only for a life that will be more compassionate and decent than the cruelty, paranoia, greed, narrow corporatism, or narcissism we mostly indulge in and find such ample justification for. And so we dream. ~ Breyten Breytenbach

The beauty was in the waking of the powerless. Is it always to be true that it is impossible to have things strong and at the same time beautiful? The famished men need not stay famished. But to gorge themselves in this heartbreaking way consuming, utterly destroying the common promise of their greed, was that ever necessary? ~ Ayi Kwei Armah

Our global corporate investment bank competes with Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and a bunch of other banks that are in those businesses. We may have slightly different products or services, but so what? That's always been true in American business. ~ Jamie Dimon

I'm always surprised when the corporate world does stupid things, because they're often not very stupid in hindsight. ~ Penn Jillette

Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister", a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance. ~ Timothy Egan

The Master said, "A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with."
(Analects 4.9) ~ Confucius

Maybe she'll be one of the lucky ones who gets to see it from a distance and makes it home in one piece. Maybe I'll be ripping out her spine tomorrow. I hope she makes it home first. It would suck to be killed and reanimated while wearing corporate antennae. Though, it wouldn't be as bad as reanimating dressed like a crab or a taco because you were pimping a new restaurant when you died. There's a difference between a bad death and the universe stopping by to take a great big shit on you. I ~ Richard Kadrey

The Bible and several other self help or enlightenment books cite the Seven Deadly Sins. They are: pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, sloth, and gluttony. That pretty much covers everything that we do, that is sinful ... or fun for that matter. ~ Dave Mustaine

Critical discussions of Western colonialism and imperialism and of what the term postcolonialism could mean, require, and enable first became acceptable in literature and cultural studies departments in the United States some three decades ago. Yet it has been much harder to create such discussions of sciences and technologies. Especially resistant are those departments where the West's scientific rationality and technical expertise have long been lovingly explained and "served up" for use in corporate and nationalist policies: sociology, philosophy, economics, and international relations, as well as the natural sciences themselves. ~ Sandra G. Harding

Bad things are inside everyone. I don't care how gentle or holy or sincere or dedicated you are. There are bad things in there. Lust. Greed. Violence. You don't need a wicked queen to make that happen. That's a part of everyone. Some more, some less, but it's always there. ~ Jim Butcher

That's not easy to find in a corporate world, somebody who cares about music. ~ Michael Penn

Those that much covet are with gain so fond,
For what they have not, that which they possess
They scatter and unloose it from their bond,
And so, by hoping more, they have but less;
Or, gaining more, the profit of excess
Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain,
That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain. ~ William Shakespeare

Because of the control of the media by corporate wealth, the discovery of truth depends on an alternative media, such as small radio stations, networks, programs. Also, alternative newspapers, which exist all over the country. Also, cable TV programs, which are not dependent on commercial advertising. Also, the internet, which can reach millions of people by-passing the conventional media. ~ Howard Zinn

The challenge will be to get the big corporate customers giving them their business, but it might be difficult in reality. ~ Chris Avery

Nonviolent nationalism is a necessary condition of corporate or civilized life. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Things joined by profit, when pressed by misfortune and danger, will cast each other aside. ~ Zhuangzi

It was here I learnt that corporate principles and military principles are basically the same. Insulation. Illusion. Hype. Activity. ~ Tarun J. Tejpal

Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street. ~ Cornel West

I have a book of poetry I believe many should read but in each verse you'll discover it wasn't written for greed. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

I think when I was on the corporate ladder, it was very difficult to maintain the hours. It's a little easier when you have you're an entrepreneur. ~ Tory Burch

I am amazed at the heart of man: It possesses the substance of wisdom as well as the opposites contrary to it ... for if hope arises in it, it is brought low by covetousness: and if covetousness is aroused in it, greed destroys it. If despair possesses it, self piety kills it: and if it is seized by anger, this is intensified by rage. If it is blessed with contentment, then it forgets to be careful; and if it is filled with fear, then it becomes preoccupied with being cautious. If it feels secure , then it is overcome by vain hopes; and if it is given wealth, then its independence makes it extravagant. If want strikes it, then it is smitten by anxiety. If it is weakened by hunger, then it gives way to exhaustion; and if it goes too far in satisfying its appetites, then its inner becomes clogged up. So all its shortcomings are harmful to it, and all its excesses corrupt it. ~ Ali Ibn Abi Talib

Regardless of the amount of kashays [anger, pride, deceit, greed] the other person creates, if you win over the kashays with the Gnan [real knowledge] abundance from within, when the kashays have no effect on you from within, then it is considered as winning the world. ~ Dada Bhagwan

Shh! It happens. Sh!it happens. ~ Vikrmn

For the first 200 years of our nation's history, corporations were never defined by the courts as persons with free speech rights under the First Amendment. Only in recent years have we witnessed this corporate takeover of our First Amendment, culminating in the Citizens United ruling. ~ John Bonifaz

There is no one story that will replace the American dream, but stories
like this one - and there are thousands - can inform the myth or myths
we create for building and preserving the next culture. In order to do so,
however, we must recognize that we cannot live without myth, for it is an
essential part of our humanity. If we attempt to do so - given the fact that
something in us needs myth - we
will only create more myths that echo
the American dream - with themes of heroism, greed, entitlement, narcissism,
exploitation, exceptionalism, and myriad abuses of power. How we prepare for and navigate collapse will provide the raw materials for the myths we make and will live by in a postindustrial world. ~ Carolyn Baker

Why do progress and beauty have to be so opposed? ; 75
Also, as in war, the case, like a great bubbling cauldron of life itself, threw up both good and evil. Greed, madness, cruelty and indifference were countered by goodness, devotion, self-sacrifice, and courage. p 178 ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

They are dazzled by all the money that they are being offered. That is what money does, Mma Ramotswe - you must have seen that. Sometime we need to look the other way when people put money in front of our noses. We have to look at the other things we can see so the money doesn't hide them. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers. ~ Chris Hedges

Blue fire ran along the blade. With the Goddess's commanding pose and a flaming sword in hand, she resembled angel Uriel. ~ A.O. Peart

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. ~ Erich Fromm

But Sales + Customers = Nothing Broken is a formula for corporate cyanide. ~ Kevin Ashton

As we're told that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer-based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, and as the PowerPoint throws up aphoristic bromides by the corporate heroes of the digitally driven 'global economy'
the implication being that 'great companies' know what they're doing, while most schools don't
and as we're goaded mercilessly to the conclusion that everything we are, know, and do is bound for the dustbin of history, I want to ask what kind of schooling Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had. Wasn't it at bottom the very sort of book-based, content-driven education that we declare obsolete in the name of their achievements? ~ Garret Keizer