Pharmaceutical Companies Quotes

Skeptics might argue that pharmaceutical companies will fight anything that casts their products in a dubious light - especially if it results in people using lower doses across the board - but the truth is that, for many drug companies, reliable information on the placebo effect can't come soon enough. To pass muster, a drug must outperform placebo. But a 2001 study of antidepressant drug trials showed that while drug efficacy is rising, placebo rates are rising faster. It's almost ironic; the factors behind this are many and varied, but a significant contributor is our society's knowledge of - and belief in - the power of medicines. The pharmaceutical industry's palpable success means that unless something radical happens, it could soon be, like the Red Queen, running to stand still. ~ Michael Brooks

Since the 1920s, virtually all continuing medical and public health education is funded by pharmaceutical companies. In fact, today, the FDA can't even tell health scientists the truth about vaccine contaminants and their likely effects. The agency is bound and gagged by proprietary laws and non-disclosure agreements forced upon them by the pharmaceutical industry. Let us not forget that the pharmaceutical industry, as a special interest group, is the number one contributor to politicians on Capital Hill. ~ Leonard Horowitz

Giselle Chapman was hired by Bristol-Myers Squibb, one of the leading pharmaceutical companies at that time. She became their number one sales representative, and went on to form her own consulting company. ~ Mark Goulston

Melancholy

(1) An excess of black bile, anatomized by Robert Burton, embraced by the swooning Romantics as evidence of their fine sensibilities, now fallen into disrepair, renamed as depression, wrongly attributed to a deficiency of serotonin and cured by infantilizing, self-indulgent 'therapy' and overpriced, addictive drugs pushed on harassed, gullible doctors by unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies which suppress their terrible side-effects in order to pursue their profits.

(2) A crippling disease of unknown aetiology which throughout human history has devoured hope, destroyed lives and, after a period of living death, sometimes relaxed its grip just long enough for the sufferer to summon the energy for a merciful suicide; now, at last, frequently curable by a combination of therapy and antidepressants. ~ Michael Bywater

Hope is beyond price and the pharmaceutical companies, which are run by businessmen not altruists, price their products accordingly. ~ Henry Marsh

Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer. ~ Ben Goldacre

Agarikon contains antiviral molecules new to science. Researchers for pharmaceutical companies may have missed its potent antiviral properties. Our analyses show that the mycelial cultures of this mushroom are most active but that the fruitbodies, the natural form of the mushroom, are not. ~ Paul Stamets

Pharmaceutical companies are enjoying unprecedented profits and access with this Administration. Yet the Republicans' prescription drug plan for seniors has been a colossal failure, and over 43 million Americans wake up every morning without health insurance. ~ Jim Clyburn

Sociologists of regulation - such people exist - talk about something called 'regulatory capture'. This is the process whereby a state regulator ends up promoting the interests of the industry it is supposed to monitor, at the expense of the public interest. It can happen for a number of reasons, and many of them are very human. For example, if you work in the technical business o f drug approval and pharmacovigilance, who can you chat to about your day's work? To your partner, it's all baffling and pedantic; but to the people in the regulatory affairs division of the companies you work with every day, they understand. You have so much in common with them. So industry bodies - not even necessarily the pharmaceutical companies themselves - might offer things as intangible as friendship, and opportunities to socialize. ~ Ben Goldacre

The field of U.S. cancer care is organized around a medical monopoly that ensures a continuous flow of money to the pharmaceutical companies, medical technology firms, research institutes, and government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and quasi-public organizations such as the American Cancer Society (ACS). ~ John Diamond

Michael Moore announced that his next documentary film will attack the health care industry in America. He's not out to get the pharmaceutical companies. He's just looking for something to relieve the redness in the center of the country. ~ Argus Hamilton

Suicide rates have not slumped under the onslaught of antidepressants, mood-stabilizers, anxiolytic and anti-psychotic drugs; the jump in suicide rates suggests that the opposite is true. In some cases, suicide risk skyrockets once treatment begins (the patient may feel not only penalized for a justifiable reaction, but permanently stigmatized as malfunctioning). Studies show that self-loathing sharply decreases only in the course of cognitive-behavioral treatment. ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Pharmaceutical companies are very annoyed with niacin because their products have to compete with it. Some of their cholesterol-lowering drugs cost up to $150 a month while niacin costs about $10. ~ Abram Hoffer

EIGHTH AMENDMENT
The government shall not "crack down" on drug crime while taking kickbacks from industries and companies perpetuating addiction and abuse. You can't fight wars on drugs - only on people. The drug war kills people, not drugs. Anytime you hear a politician talk about being tough on drugs but then say nothing about pharmaceutical companies, doctors, or insurance providers needing reform as well, you call them what they are: hacks. And hit them in the fa - we mean, vote against them. ~ Trae Crowder

I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. ~ James Hillman

They're [[harmaceuticals companies] just making a killing out of people's death. And they're benefiting by people's suffering. And I find that obscene. I find it ridiculous in this day and age, that that would happen. And it took President Clinton to go to rogue pharmaceutical companies to copy the antiretroviral drugs for a fraction of the cost. ~ Elton John

Now is not the time to give greater protections to pharmaceutical companies that put unsafe drugs like Vioxx on the market. Such protections have nothing to do with the liability insurance crisis facing doctors and should be stripped from this bill. ~ Dennis Cardoza

An enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies are offering a kind of instantaneous solution to problems. ~ Leon Kass

Well, as I understand it, the main supporters are beer companies and the pharmaceutical companies. I'd like them to show me the dead bodies from marijuana. But they can't because there aren't any. ~ Jack Herer

When I was in the Maine Senate and proposed Maine RX - a plan to lower prescription drug costs by forcing the pharmaceutical companies to negotiate - I was told by many people that it was too big an idea, and we couldn't overcome opposition from the drug companies. ~ Chellie Pingree

Competition makes things come out right. Well, what does that mean in health care? More hospitals so they compete with each other. More doctors compete with each other. More pharmaceutical companies. We set up war. Wait a minute, let's talk about the patient. The patient doesn't need a war. ~ Donald Berwick

I had a critical father. I'm more like my father. He was a sales rep for pharmaceutical companies. ~ Martha Stewart

It's a fucking pharmaceutical conspiracy, Eve. We've wiped out just about every known plague, disease, and infection. Oh, we come up with a new one every now and again, to give the researchers something to do. But none of these bright-eyed medical types, none of the medi-computers can figure out how to cure the common fucking cold. You know why?"
Even couldn't stop the smile. She waited patiently until Mavis finished another bout of explosive sneezing. "Why?"
"Because the pharmaceutical companies need to sell drugs. You know what a damn sinus tab costs? You can get anticancer injections cheaper. I swear it. ~ J.D. Robb

Gene patents are the point of greatest concern in the debate over ownership of human biological materials, and how that ownership might interfere with science. As of 2005 - the most recent year figures were available - the U.S. government had issued patents relating to the use of about 20 percent of known human genes, including genes for Alzheimer's, asthma, colon cancer, and, most famously, breast cancer. This means pharmaceutical companies, scientists, and universities control what research can be done on those genes, and how much resulting therapies and diagnostic tests will cost. And some enforce their patents aggressively: Myriad Genetics, which holds the patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes responsible for most cases of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, charges $3,000 to test for the genes. Myriad has been accused of creating a monopoly, since no one else can offer the test, and researchers can't develop cheaper tests or new therapies without getting permission from Myriad and paying steep licensing fees. Scientists who've gone ahead with research involving the breast-cancer genes without Myriad's permission have found themselves on the receiving end of cease-and-desist letters and threats of litigation. ~ Rebecca Skloot

Now, what tends to happen is that the stories get hyped. And the medicines are not quite as revolutionary and as dramatic as they seem to be. But, certainly, various phases of this problem are being attacked by the pharmaceutical companies. ~ Mort Kondracke

Here we will see that pharmaceutical companies spend tens of billions of pounds every year trying to change the treatment decisions of doctors: in fact, they spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on the research and development of new drugs. Since we all want doctors to prescribe medicine based on evidence, and evidence is universal, there is only one possible reason for such huge spends: to distort evidence-based practice. ~ Ben Goldacre

The principal villain in rising health care costs is the government. Not pharmaceutical companies, not doctors, but government. ~ Neal Boortz

I keep encouraging the pharmaceutical companies to put more money into R&D. ~ Harold E. Varmus

And these [pharmaceutical] companies are still threatening to sue. And it's like, you know, do you not have a conscience? Do you not want the world to be a better place? You're still making a profit. How much more of a profit do you want to make? ~ Elton John

Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's "spleen," Edgar Allan Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced*....
If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so--for profit, of course.

*This does not mean that Sylvia Plath should not have been medicated at all. The point is that pathologies should be medicated when there is risk of suicide, not mood swings. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The pharmaceutical drug industry is a half-trillion dollar per year global industry, with almost 300 billion dollars in the United States alone. The pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders rely on people to be sick, or else their stocks will plummet. There is no money to be made in health. ~ Joseph P. Kauffman

not put in place, one wonders how insurance and pharmaceutical companies will treat our grandchildren if they have genetic information about them, perhaps even before they are even conceived. Insurance ~ Christine Kenneally

I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tradgedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue. ~ David Lovelace

I am not against the pharmaceutical companies. I love them. That's not the issue. The issue is, in some cases, when they do these clinical trials, they control the data. They analyze the data. In some cases, they even write the article. And that leads to at least the perception, if not the reality, that there's a conflict of interest. ~ Catherine D. DeAngelis

Washington-based industry lobby group, reported that in 1999 American biotech companies spent more than half of the sector's revenues, $11 billion in total, on research. No other industrial group spends anything near that proportion of total revenues on research, not even the major pharmaceutical companies, which are usually named as the world's biggest R&D spenders. ~ George Wolff

Pharmaceutical companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new HIV/AIDS treatments not out of altruism but because they can make up those research costs in sales. ~ David Mixner

Wake up America!
The insurance companies took over health care!
Wake up America!
The pharmaceutical companies took over drug pricing!
Wake up America!
The speculators took over Wall Street!
Wake up America!
They want your Social Security!
Wake up America!
Multinational corporations took over our trade policies!
Wake up America!
We went into Iraq for oil!
WAKE UP AMERICA! ~ Dennis Kucinich

Big Pharma needs sick people to prosper. Patients, not healthy people, are their customers. If everybody was cured of a particular illness or disease, pharmaceutical companies would lose 100% of their profits on the products they sell for that ailment. What all this means is because modern medicine is so heavily intertwined with the financial profits culture, it's a sickness industry more than it is a health industry. ~ James Morcan

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming found that a mysterious antibacterial fungus had grown on a petri dish he'd forgotten to cover in his laboratory: he discovered penicillin by accident. Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since. Modern drug discovery aims to amplify Fleming's serendipitous circumstances a millionfold: pharmaceutical companies search through combinations of molecular compounds at random, hoping to find a hit. ~ Peter Thiel

I want to go after the pharmaceutical companies like Valeant, and Turns that are increasing prices without any regard to the impact on people's health. ~ Hillary Clinton

I'd never have guessed that, six years after Medicare introduced a drug benefit, it would still be forbidden to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. Health reform might fix that, but it probably won't. ~ Timothy Noah

The real danger is found in Humanity's refusal to move beyond the trap of instinct and into the intellectual mind. The refusal to accept our health and the health of every other living thing on this planet must always come before profit. Whether it's the oil companies, pharmaceutical companies; or anyone else; we are not Gods no matter how much the New Agers like to proclaim it. In that path lies the rubble of the enemy of life, his Fallen God Bombers and his murderous dark medics. Out of that emanates the force of fear; fear of judgement, fear of difference and fear the other will bring you pain. ~ Cole J. Davis

Most big companies work in stealth until they think they have a consumer product ready to go. ~ Brendan Iribe

$200, 300 million games, I'm a little scared about that; there aren't a lot of companies that have the resources or the courage to spend that much. ~ Warren Spector

During the desperate depression of the 1980s, there were no oil and gas companies without net operating losses. ~ George Kaiser

I came out of school just at the time regional theater was first expanding. All of a sudden, lots of new companies needed actors. ~ Charles Kimbrough

Well, the good news is that there's quite a lot of cynicism about major labels within radio and the press. I think they have been largely disillusioned by the manner in which the record companies have developed music. ~ Mick Hucknall

But this I can never explain to a painter, I suppose; how words live in companies, never used, exept when one writes. (5/2/1925 - From a letter to Jacques Raverat) ~ Virginia Woolf

People may be prepared to buy services from Apple and Amazon if they feel these companies do a good job, but we need to ensure that we can speak up when our content is used by other people for their profit. An activist amateur culture will constantly challenge and say, 'This is mine, you're not doing that with it.' ~ Charles Leadbeater

I feel the film companies should pay for proper advertising to see that the movie will sell, instead of putting it on our backs. ~ Billy Crudup

Experts said public companies worry about the loss of customer confidence and the legal liability to shareholders or security vendors when they report flaws. ~ Barton Gellman

What an economy really wants, after all, is not more investment per se but better investment. It wants capital to flow to companies that will create value - not in the form of a rising stock price but in the form of more goods for less cost, more jobs, and rising wages - by enhancing productivity. ~ James Surowiecki

The companies that provide debt, what do you think their goal is? Is their goal for you to fully understand the cost of your debt? No. So they're basically creating these approaches to make you feel like it is incredibly cheap or just to think about the cost per day rather the cost per year or cost for a lifetime. So debt is very simple mistake. ~ Dan Ariely

People don't realize how much the food industry has infiltrated all aspects of our children's lived experience, including their experience at school. There are sponsored curricula by food companies, they're also in our schools with logos sponsoring sports teams. ~ Anna Lappe

I think there is a need to have more women running companies, but you can't ... appoint women just to appoint women, just to satisfy a particular condition. What you want more than anything is to develop women in the organisation who will, when they get to the top, be fully capable of delivering and doing the job effectively. ~ Cynthia Carroll

The connectivity declaration is about uniting the whole industry - a lot of companies that typically compete very fiercely - to push in a coherent direction. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

I always thought that if record companies didn't understand me, fine - I'd go and do it by myself. ~ Estelle

The insurance companies do not refer to the key policy rate when they send their statements. We can only control that rate. Long-term interest rates are determined largely by global financial markets. ~ Mario Draghi

When we love something, emotion often drives our actions.
This is the gift and the challenge entrepreneurs face every day. The companies we dream of and build from scratch are part of us and intensely personal. They are our families. Our lives.
But the entrepreneurial journey is not for everyone. Yes, the highs are high and the rewards can be thrilling. But the lows can break your heart. Entrepreneurs must love what they do to such a degree that doing it is worth sacrifice and, at times, pain. But doing anything else, we think, would be unimaginable ~ Howard Schultz

I have realised more and more that great companies, founded for a long-term purpose, such as Google or Facebook or SpaceX, may do more good in the world than any other vehicle that we have. ~ Luke Nosek

Stocks of companies selling commodity-like products should come with a warning label: Competition may prove hazardous to human wealth. ~ Warren Buffett

There are lots of companies that are really trying to collect as much information as they can about every single person on the planet because they think its going to be valuable and it probably already is valuable. ~ Stuart J. Russell

The best way we can encourage people to create companies that create jobs is to celebrate the diverse entrepreneurial stories and the variety of drivers that led these entrepreneurs to sticking their necks out. ~ Chip Conley

The issue for the major companies is how, is how when and where to make their content online. So you look at these major cable companies, whether it's Disney or Time Warner, News Corp., ESPN, USA, they're being very very careful, about making their content available over the internet, and they're trying to figure it out. ~ Harry E. Sloan

1. Keep speculation and investments separate.
2. Don't be fooled by a name.
3. Be wary of new promotions.
4. Give due consideration to market ability.
5. Don't buy without proper facts.
6. Safeguard purchases through diversification.
7. Don't try to diversify by buying different securities of the same company.
8. Small companies should be carefully scrutinized.
9. Buy adequate security, not super abundance.
10. Choose your dealer and buy outright. (Babson abhorred any type of margin or installment payment plans and, in fact, claimed he never borrowed money.) ~ Kenneth L. Fisher

The United States is imposing sanctions on individuals and companies working to advance Iran's ballistic missile program, and we are going to remain vigilant about it. We're not going to waver in the defense of our security or that of our allies and partners. ~ Barack Obama

We see Google experimenting in so many places outside of its core search and advertising business, whether that's bringing broadband Internet to the world or funding an entirely separate company to pursue solutions to disease and mortality. Amazon's one of the few other companies that thinks as big as Google does. ~ Brad Stone

While many have been left behind by Part D, there is a clear winner: the drug industry. Independent analysts predict that Part D will increase drug industry profits by $139 billion over the next eight years. Glaxo-SmithKline's second-quarter net income already jumped 14 percent, and other leading drug companies also have benefited. ~ Louise Slaughter

When you have a food safety system that's voluntary and not mandatory, you're in a situation in which everybody wants everybody else to go first. So as a normal course of doing business, food companies cut corners and don't want to take the kind of trouble and the kind of testing and the kind of careful procedures that are required to produce the safe food because they don't have to. ~ Marion Nestle

As people come to understand the environmental damages being caused by carbon and industry pollutants, there is a call for "full-cost accounting." This is an effort to include the adverse environmental costs of manufacturing and other production in the price of producing those items--from the cost of cleanup to the health impacts of carbon pollution. Currently, companies' profit-and-loss statements don't account for these and other costs, which are paid for by us all, and disproportionately by the poor and vulnerable. By failing to pay for the real cost of production, by misrepresenting or ignoring the vast consequences of some of their work, certain businesses and corporations have pursued paths that are at odds with the interests of society. A greater movement toward full-cost accounting is critical if we are going to align business decisions with what is in the best interests of future generations... ~ Cory Booker

Let's face it: Most companies in most industries have a kind of tunnel vision. They chase the same opportunities that everyone else is chasing, they miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing. It's the companies that see a different game that win big. The most important question for innovators today is: What do you see that the competition doesn't see? ~ Bill Taylor

Offbeat questions are nearly impossible to prepare for, and they don't achieve the interviewer's objective - to test out-of-the-box thinking and the ability to perform under pressure. That's the bad news. The good news is that companies are moving away from them. ~ Travis Bradberry

the laboratories established by German pharmaceutical and dye manufacturers in the 1880s and 1890s as the first truly institutionalized research laboratories, and to General Electric's 1900 laboratory as the pioneer in America.17 ~ Josh Lerner

Research has found that in most companies managers who get promoted rapidly spend most of their time networking and politicking, while their more effective colleagues spent their time building their units and developing their people. ~ Alan G. Robinson

When conventional medicine fails, when we must confront pain and death, of course we are open to other prospects for hope.
And, after all, some illnesses are psychogenic. Many can be at least ameliorated by a positive cast of mind. Placebos are dummy drugs, often sugar pills. Drug companies routinely compare the effectiveness of their drugs against placebos given to patients with the same disease who had no way to tell the difference between the drug and the placebo. Placebos can be astonishingly effective, especially for colds, anxiety, depression, pain, and symptoms that are plausibly generated by the mind. Conceivably, endorphins -the small brain proteins with morphine-like effects - can be elicited by belief. A placebo works only if the patient believes it's an effective medicine. Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be transformed into biochemistry. ~ Carl Sagan

As we settle into 2013, I predict this: We'll see companies that promote this shift from private ownership thrive. More people will be able to access things they simply don't need to own, and they'll save money and live better, cleaner, green lives doing it. ~ Lynn Jurich

Many people and companies only have one goal: money, money, and more money. Greed is ok when you let others profit from it, but greed for oneself is bad, it makes you ill. ~ Dalai Lama

In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy. ~ James Surowiecki

Management guru Jim Collins has some good words here. He and Morten T. Hansen studied leadership in turbulent times. They looked at more than twenty thousand companies, sifting through data in search of an answer to this question: Why in uncertain times do some companies thrive while others do not? They concluded, "[Successful leaders] are not more creative. They're not more visionary. They're not more charismatic. They're not more ambitious. They're not more blessed by luck. They're not more risk-seeking. They're not more heroic. And they're not more prone to making big, bold moves." Then what sets them apart? "They all led their teams with a surprising method of self-control in an out-of-control world."2 ~ Max Lucado

I think that distributors and marketing companies realise that there are a huge number of women over 40 who want to go the cinema and see films about themselves. Women of my age don't want to be force-fed with stuff about 25-year-olds. ~ Lesley Manville

The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person that's gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. And there's not enough information to do that - it's an intuitive process. ~ Steve Jobs

Early in my career when we went to golf tournaments and charity dinners I noticed businessmen and executives would give the players their cards. Well, they're giving you their cards for a reason. I said to my wife, 'All the guys get these cards and then when they get to the parking lot they rip them up or throw them away. It's really weird.' My wife .. said maybe you should just sign a picture and mail it to them. You know, 'Great playing golf with you,' or whatever. So, I did and lo and behold some of those guys I sent pictures to way back then are now CEOs at big companies. ~ Tie Domi

You could have a zillion Facebook followers. Those people don't buy records. It's about a hundred to one ... Record companies, they don't have any money, so they see social media as the free marketing ... So ... 'Billy, light yourself on fire and stand upside down, and that'll market the record.' ~ Billy Corgan

Nothing keeps a company honest and efficient like the threat of other companies coming along and taking its business away. ~ John Stossel