Quotes About Corporations
compiled by George
Draffan
© Public Information Network, PO Box 95316, Seattle WA 98145-2316
Corporation:
an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual
responsibility. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary. Bierce's
definition of impunity is "wealth").
I see in the near future a crisis
approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my
country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in
high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to
prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all
wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." (U.S.
President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864, letter to Col. William F. Elkins,
in The Lincoln Encyclopedia, by Archer H. Shaw).
The legal make-believe that the
corporation is a person, the ingenuities by which it has been fitted out
with a domicile, the elaborate web of 'as-ifs' which the courts have woven,
have put corporate affairs pretty largely out of the regulations we decree.
[The corporation, unlike real persons has] no anatomical parts to be kicked
or consigned to the calaboose; no conscience to keep it awake all night; no
soul for whose salvation the parson may struggle; no body to be roasted in
hell or purged for celestial enjoyment. [No one can lay] bodily hands upon
General Motors or Westinghouse...or incarcerate the Pennsylvania Railroad or
Standard Oil of New Jersey with all its works. (Walton H Hamilton, economist
and lawyer, On the Composition of the Corporate Veil, written in the
1940's).
The exercise of the police power of the
state shall never be so abridged or construed as to permit corporations to
conduct their business in such manner as to infringe the rights of
individuals or the general well-being of the State. (California Constitution
of 1879, Article XII, Section 8)
Nothing
is illegal if 100 businessmen decide to do it. Andrew Young, in Money Talks.
Private enterprise is
ceasing to be free
enterprise. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became
privileged enterprise, not free enterprise. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in
Money Talks.
Corporations have been enthroned....
An
era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will
endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the
people...until wealth is aggregated in a few hands...and the Republic is
destroyed." (Abraham Lincoln, 1865).
THE
NEW UNHAPPY LORDS
They have given us into the hand of new
unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honor, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labor and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.
GK
Chesterton - "The Secret People"
We all know that, as things actually are,
many of the most influential and most highly remunerated members of the Bar
in every center of wealth, make it their special task to work out bold and
ingenious schemes by which their wealthy clients, individual or corporate,
can evade the laws which were made to regulate, in the interests of the
public, the uses of great wealth. (T. Roosevelt, 1905, at his Harvard
Commencement address).
Corporations are "worms in the body
politic." (Thomas Hobbes).
From top to bottom
the whole system is a
fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are
consenting parties to it. (Henry Adams, cited in Gore Vidal's The Decline
and Fall of the American Empire).
The most difficult problem of modern times
is unquestionably how to protect property under popular governments. (Brooks
Adams, cited in Gore Vidal's The Decline and Fall of the American Empire).
We have a single system, and in that
system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be
bought and sold, the bread and circuses. (Henry Adams, cited in Gore Vidal's The Decline and Fall of the American Empire).
This country is a hell of a success.
(U.S. House Speaker Uncle Joe Cannon, 1903-1911, who
always did his
best to obstruct reform).
We ought to pass a law that
no man worth
$100,000,000 should be tried for a crime. (U.S. Senator Norris, in the
1920s, after an industrialist was acquitted of charges of corruption, cited
in Lundberg, America's 60 Families, p. 189).
Let us
disappoint the men who would raise
themselves upon the ruin of our country. (John Adams).
I hope that we shall
crush in its birth
the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge
our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our
country. (Thomas Jefferson, in 1816, quoted in Lawrence Goodwyn, The
Populist Moment).
Thomas Jefferson, the man who wanted an
amendment to the Constitution prohibiting monopoly, would be aghast at our
billion-dollar corporations. Jefferson, who abolished primogeniture and
entail in Virginia in order to prevent monopoly in land, would be appalled
by our high percentage of tenancy. Jefferson as the man who dreaded the day
when many of our citizens might become landless, would perhaps feel our
civilization was trembling on the brink of ruin, if he were to find so many
of our people without either land or tools, and subject to the hire and
power of distant corporations. If the Jefferson of 1820 could see his name
used by men crying `States' rights!' in order to protect not individual
liberties but corporate property, then he would shudder. (Henry A. Wallace,
November 17, 1937, former populist U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and
Vice-President of the United States).
Great corporations exist only because they
are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our
right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with those institutions.
(T. Roosevelt, 1901, first annual message to Congress).
Now as through this world I ramble,
I see lots of funny men,
Some rob you with a six gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
(Woody Guthrie,
Pretty Boy Floyd).
You got criminals in high places, and law
breakers making the rules. (Bob Dylan).
In general, the art of government consists
in taking as much money as possible from one class of the citizens to
give
to another. (Voltaire).
Civil government, so far as it is
instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the
defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property
against those who have none at all. (Adam Smith, 1776, Wealth of Nations,
book V, ch.I, part II).
The
power to tax involves the power to
destroy. (U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, 1819).
Commerce is entitled to a complete and
efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes
to
control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high
principles of natural justice that ought to lie at the root of every
political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked. (James Fenimore
Cooper, The American Democrat, 1838).
To ignore the pivotal role played by
particular individuals who are in positions of power is
to do violence to
historical accuracy. A recognition that the course of economic events can be
influenced by individuals who have the imagination and the power to take
advantage of prevailing conditions does not constitute acceptance of a
'conspiracy' theory of history. (John Blair, former chief economist for the
U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Anti-Trust and Monopoly, cited by A.V. Krebs).
To secure to each laborer the whole
product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any
good government. (Abraham Lincoln, December 1, 1847 speech).
Big business is not dangerous because it
is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by
privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy. (Woodrow Wilson,
acceptance speech, Democratic National Convention, July 7, 1912).
I know of no original product invention,
not even electric shavers or heating pads, made by any of the giant
laboratories or corporations... The record of the giants is one of
moving
in, buying out, and absorbing the small creators. (General Electric vice
president John Molloy, Molloy's Live for Success, New York: Bantam,
1983).
The real fight today is against
inhuman,
relentless exercise of capitalistic power... The present struggle in which
we are engaged is for social and industrial justice. (U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis, in Money Talks).
You shall not press down
upon the brow of
labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of
gold. (William Jennings Bryan, speech at Democratic National Convention,
1896).
The press is the hired agent of a
moneyed
system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the
interests are involved. Henry Adams, quoted in Derrick Jensen,
Remembering, April 1997 draft).
all of it from them. (Edward Filene, in
Schlesinger's The Coming of a New Deal, 1959).
Do you want to know the cause of war? It
is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist
and you will sweep war from the earth. (Henry Ford, interview, Detroit
News).
Corporations have at different times been
so far unable to distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of lying that
their freedom has to be curbed. (Carl Becker, 1873-1945, in Money Talks).
No business is above Government; and
Government must be empowered to deal adequately with any business that tries
to rise above Government. (Franklin D. Roosevelt, in Money Talks).
Out of this modern civilization royalists
carved new dynasties... The royalists of the economic order have conceded
that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have
maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. Franklin D.
Roosevelt, renomination speech, June 27, 1936.
In the councils of government,
we must
guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for disastrous
rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. President
Dwight
Eisenhower, farewell address, Jan. 17, 1961.
When the men in Russia foul up, they are
dismissed, sometimes losing their necks. But we protect those who fail and
press them to the government bosom. Hyman Rickover, U.S. Navy, in Money
Talks.
Capitalism in the United States has
undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a
consensus that continued after the New Deal... Government in the U.S. today
is a senior partner in every business in the country.
Norman Cousins, in
Money Talks.
Free enterprise is dead in some segments
of our economy and seemingly on its death bed in others. It, however,
is not
beyond cure. The medicine I propose is a large dose of antitrust. U.S.
Senator Philip A. Hart, 1912-1976, in Money Talks.
Wealth is not the fruit of labor but the
result of organized protected robbery.
Franz Fanon, in Money Talks.
I have a consistent rule:
The American
people should know as much about the Pentagon as the Soviet Union and China
do, as much about General Motors as Ford does, and as much about City Bank
as Chase Manhattan does. Ralph Nader, in Money Talks.
Nothing short of a federal investigation
can begin to disclose the abuses which have woven a fine web of mutually
implicating relationships between businessmen and government officials.
Ralph Nader, in Money Talks.
Why is it legitimate to invite a member of
Congress to make a speech before a trade association and pay him $5,000 when
everyone knows he has nothing to say? Isn't that a subtle form of
corruption? Peter Nehemkis, UCLA School of Management, in Money Talks.
I know of no safe depository of the
ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them
not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome
discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their
discretion. (Thomas Jefferson).
The great, greedy, indifferent national
and international economy is killing rural America, just as it is killing
American cities... Experience has shown that there is no use in appealing to
this economy for mercy toward the earth or toward any human community.
All
true patriots must find ways of opposing it. (Wendell Berry, Conservation
and the Local Economy, Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community: Eight Essays,
Pantheon, New York, 1993).
As long as corporate management considers
public interests as merely incidental to private interests, we can hardly
expect the final solution of the conservation problem from voluntary
decisions by directors of corporations... As long as the maximization of
profit remains the cornerstone of acquisitive society and capitalist
economy, corporations will retain their interest in scarcity as a creator of
economic value. Social welfare demands abundance, distributed justly and
spread out over a longer time than even the most progressive and liberal
corporation executive at present dares consider. (Erich W. Zimmermann,
World Resources and Industries, 1951 edition, p.811).
Practical men, who believe themselves to
be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the
slaves of
some defunct economist. (John Maynard Keynes).
I sympathize therefore, with those who
would minimize, rather than those who would maximize, economic entanglement
between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel--these are the
things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be
homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible; and, above
all, let finance be primarily national. (John Maynard Keynes, "National
Self-Sufficiency," in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes,
vol. 21, edited by Donald Muggeridge. London: Macmillan and Cambridge
University Press, 1933).
business
must act in concert with a
broad public interest and serve the objectives of mankind and society or it
will not survive. (Lammot du Pont Copeland, chairman of DuPont).
If monopoly persists,
monopoly will always
sit at the helm of government. I do not expect monopoly to restrain itself.
If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the
United States, they are going to own it. (President Woodrow Wilson).
We have nothing left but
our great empty
corporation statutes--towering skyscrapers internally welded together and
containing nothing but wind. (Bayless Manning, cited in The Monopoly
Makers).
The freest government if it could exist
would not be accepted if the tendency of the laws was to create a rapid
accumulation of property in a few hands and to render the great mass of the
people dependent. (Daniel Webster, cited in The Monopoly Makers).
There is not one grain of anything in the
world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a
free market is in the speeches of politicians. (Wayne Andreas, CEO of Archer
Daniels Midland, Z Magazine, April 1997, p. 29).
The root of the evil... lay not in
corruption but in the system which bred it, the alliance between
industrialists and politicians which produced benefits in the form of
tariffs, public lands, and federal subsidies. (Samuel P. Hays, The
Response to Industrialism 1885-1914, p. 26, describing the view of E.L.
Godkin, who founded the weekly Nation).
The whole fabric of society will go to
wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. (Henry
Adams, cited in Gore Vidal's The Decline and Fall of the American Empire).
Every man is equally entitled to
protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add... artificial
distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make
the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of
society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers--who have neither the time nor
the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of
the injustice of their government. (President Andrew Jackson, veto of
national bank bill, July 10, 1832).
Did you ever expect a corporation to have
a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?
(Lord Chancellor of England Edward First Baron Thurlow, cited in Business
& Society Review, No. 72, Winter 1990, p. 51).
I hope that we shall crush in its birth
the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge
our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our
country. (Thomas Jefferson).
When one of JP Morgan's lawyers advised
him about something he was about to do, "I don't think you can do that
legally," Morgan replied, "I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I
cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do." (Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Elbert H. Gary: The Story of Steel, New York: D.
Appleton & Co, 1925, p. 81).
As we view the achievements of aggregated
capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies,
while the citizen is struggling far in the rear, or is trampled beneath an
iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures
of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's
masters (President Grover Cleveland, 1888, quoted by Hughes, Jonathan, R. T. The Governmental Habit Redux: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to
the Present, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991, p. 112, citing
Swisher, Karl Brent, American Constitutional Development, Houghton
Mifflin, Boston, 1954, p. 422).
The person who would challenge the logic
or justice of any one aspect of the chain must eventually
confront the logic
and justice of the entire system (The Ecologist, Whose Common Future?,
p. 51).
This country, with its institutions,
belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the
existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of
amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
(Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural).
The
only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
(Edmund Burke).
America's corporations are a spiritual
slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free
society. (Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 183).
We need to publish a Catalog of
Global
Carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs eager to profit on misery. We should name names
and illustrate the book with the shocking examples of what these people and
their uncontrolled multinationals have done to the earth. We should describe
these companies, who controls them and estimate whether they are solvent
enough to put up a big environmental restoration bond. (David Brower, Beware
of Joint-Venture Vultures, Earth Island Journal, Fall 1991, p.35).
Competition, free enterprise, and an open
market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism
and monopolistic capitalism. (Ralph Nader, introduction to The Closed
Enterprise System).
The greatest evil is not now done in those
sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in
concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But
it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean,
carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars
and cut fingernails, and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their
voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like...
the
offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern. (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters).
The men at the top of organizations will
tend to be ambitious, shrewd and possessed of a non-demanding moral code.
Their ambition will not be merely personal, for they will have discovered
that their own goals are best pursued through assisting the organization to
attain its goals. While it is less true, or even untrue at the bottom of the
organization, those at the top share directly in the benefits of
organizational goal achievement, such as seeing their stock values go up,
deferred compensation, and fringe benefits... Further, being at or near the
top, these persons are those most strongly identified with the goals of the
organization... they believe in the organization, they want to attain its
goals, they profit personally from such goal attainment. So they will try
hard to help the organization attain those goals. Finally, if the
organization must engage in illegal activities to attain these goals, men
with a non-demanding moral code will have the least compunctions about
engaging in such behavior. Not only that, as men of power, pillars of the
community, they are most likely to believe that they can get away with it
without getting caught. Besides, they are shrewd. (E. Gross, Organizational
Sources of Crime, in Studies in Symbolic Interaction).
The thief who is in prison is not
necessarily more dishonest than his fellows at large, but mostly one who,
through ignorance or stupidity [or racism or poverty! - Draffan] steals in a
way that is not customary. He snatches a loaf from the baker's counter and
is promptly run into jail. Another man snatches bread from the table of
hundreds of widows and orphans and similar credulous souls who do not know
the ways of company promoters; and, as likely as not, he is run into
Parliament. (George Bernard Shaw).
General Motors could buy Delaware... if Du
Pont were willing to sell it. (Nader and Green, Corporate Power in
America, p. 79. Draffan: By 1922, Du Pont owned 37 percent of General
Motors; this tie was "broken" by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1962 -- by giving
Du Pont shareholders GM stock).
Mendoza to Tanner: "I am a brigand; I live
by robbing the rich." Tanner to Mendoza: "I am a gentleman;
I live by
robbing the poor. Shake hands." (George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman).
A newspaper must at all times antagonize
the selfish interests of that very class which furnishes the larger part of
a newspaper's income... The press in this country is dominated by the
wealthy few...that it cannot be depended upon to give the great mass of the
people that correct information concerning political, economical and social
subjects which it is necessary that the mass of people Shall have in order
that they vote...in the best way to protect themselves from the brutal force
and chicanery of the ruling and employing classes. (E.W. Scripps).
Research is digging facts. Digging facts
is as hard a job as mining coal. It means blowing them out from underground,
cutting them, picking them, shoveling them, loading them, pushing them to
the surface, weighing them and then turning them loose on the public for
fuel -- for light and heat. Facts make a fire which cannot be put out. To
get coal requires miners. To get facts requires miners too: fact miners.
(John Brophy, 1921 United Mine Workers of America Convention, cited by A.V.
Krebs).
Those who profess to favor freedom, and
yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the
ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. ...Power concedes
nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...Find out just
what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice
and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until
they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of
tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
(Frederick Douglass, 1849).
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