Best government & corporations Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“The institutions that we've built up over the years to protect our individual privacy rights from the government don't apply to the private sector. The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to corporations. The Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply to Silicon Valley. And you can't impeach Google if it breaks its 'Don't be evil' campaign pledge.”

“Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens.”

Source: Sociopathic Society: A People's Sociology of the United States

“However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always found to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand.”

Source: Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays

“Big money and big business, corporations and commerce, are again the undisputed overlords of politics and government. The White House, the Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary, reflect their interests. We appear to have a government run by remote control from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. To hell with everyone else.”

“It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form... they shall do so under absolutely truthful representations... Great corporations exist only because they were created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.”

Men Government Form Business Rights Duty Harmony Institutions Property Privilege Limitation Corporate Corporations Contracts Truthful Representation Property Rights

Author:Theodore Roosevelt

“Here’s a secret intel bulletin for all y’all who’ve never left Yoknapatawpha County and imagine the United States is constantly on the precipice of enemy invasion—the only way this country is ever going to surrender its liberty to a foreign power is if it keeps electing corrupt officials who auction it away to multinational corporations and overseas government interests in exactly the fashion that southern star chambers have been doing to their own people throughout their entire dyspeptic history.”

Source: Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession

“The intertwining of corporations and government has become so extensive in this century that the notion of a democratic balancing act has become a dangerous illusion-and one of the cornerstones of the corporate mystique.”

Government Century Dangerous Illusion Democratic Notion Corporate Corporations Cornerstones Mystique Balancing Act

Book:Corporation Nation: How Corporations are Taking Over Our Lives -- and What We Can Do About It

Source: Corporation Nation: How Corporations are Taking Over Our Lives -- and What We Can Do About It

“The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.”

Government Earth Order Powerful Versions Corporations Most Powerful Territory Entity Dependency Cultivating Hygiene

Author:Germaine Greer

“SETI is probably the most important quest of our time , and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently.”

Important Government Corporations Our Time Quests

Author:Arthur C. Clarke

“The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated... The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered... The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government.”

“Everybody knows that the federal government promises a lot and delivers damn little, and pays for most of what it does deliver out of the earnings of individuals rather than the profits of great corporations.”

Knows Littles Doe Government Individual Pay Promise Profit Corporations Damn Earning Federal Government

Author:Karl Hess

“The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and moneyed incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling...I hope we shall...crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”

“The corporation is not a person; it is a legal fiction backed up by guns and police and jail cells and taxing authorities and the regulators called government.”

Persons Government Fiction Authority Gun Police Cells Corporations Jail Regulators

Author:Jerry Brown

“I'd shrink government in a minute, if I could shrink GM, Bank of America, and all these immoral corporations that operate by an undemocratic code, with no soul and no conscience.”

Ifs Soul Government America Minutes Conscience Code Corporations If I Could Immoral Shrinks

Author:Jerry Brown

“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.”

Government Heaven Environment Security Please Advertising Corporations Interfere Federal Government Rigs

Book:Waiting for the Barbarians

Source: Waiting for the Barbarians

“Populism is at its essence just determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government. One big difference between real populism and what the Tea Party thing is, is that real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary of corporations. So you can't say, let's get rid of government. You need to be saying let's take over government.”

“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'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”

People Thinking Facts Government Roles Issues Produce Intellectual Raises Forgotten Corporations Dogma Embarrassing Orthodoxy Raison D'etre Embarrassing Questions

Author:Edward Said

“At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

“Like the government, corporations must be bound with the chains of the Constitution, and especially of the Bill of Rights.”

Government Rights Constitution Bills Bounds Chains Corporations Bill Of Rights

Author:L. Neil Smith

“As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

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

Government Economic Policy Corporations Location Economic Policy

Book:The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

“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.”

Government Economic Vulnerable Corporations Globalization Economic Globalization

Book:The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

“We consider ourselves to be free because no one in our society is allowed unlimited powerno leader, faction, party or 'class', no majority, no government, church, corporation, trade, or professional association or trade union. The secret of its freedom is that it is composed of a multitude of organisations in the constitution of the best of which is reproduced that diffusion of power which is characteristic of the whole.”

“Most of the software I sell runs on mainframes and supercomputers, and is used by multinational corporations and governments. You may not get to see that, but if I have done it properly, hopefully it will make the events in your life transpire more smoothly.”

Ifs May Done Government Running Used Events Sells Hopefully Corporations Software Rama Multinationals Multinational Corporations Supercomputers Mainframe

Author:Frederick Lenz

“The Government covers their own ass from things they fail to do to protect its own people from corporations that control the government, which is the reason we don't have checks and balances in this country. They checked how much balance they needed to influence congress and all the other branches of government in some way, shape, or form, and cash is king.”

People Way Country Reason Government Form Failing Influence Kings Needed Balance Shapes Protect Congress Checks Ass Corporations Branches Cash Branches Of Government

Author:Immortal Technique

“One of the things I tell my students is that if you want to understand what's been going on and also what needs to be done, you've got to get out of the blame game. Some people on the left want to blame the rich and corporations. Some people on the right want to blame the poor and government. Either of those frames of reference gets you nowhere and they aren't even truthful. You've got to understand the dynamic itself.”

People Ifs Want Needs Done Government Games Left Poor Rich Students Blame Corporations Truthful Frame Of Reference Blame Game

Author:Robert Reich

“Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.”

“The labor unions shall have a square deal, and the corporations shall have a square deal, and in addition, all private citizens shall have a square deal.”

Government Deals Citizens Labor Unions Corporations Squares Labor Union

Book:Letters: The Square Deal, 1901-1905

Source: Letters: The Square Deal, 1901-1905

“The mischief springs from the power which the monied interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining, and unless you become more watchful in your states and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of government have been given or bartered away.”

Source: Life and Public Services of Gen. Andrew Jackson, Seventh President of the United States: Including the Most Important of His State Papers

“Clearly we must do everything we can to protect our country from the serious potential of another terrorist attack, but we can and must do so in a way that also protects the constitutional rights of the American people and maintains our free society. We can do that without living in an Orwellian world where the government and private corporations know every telephone call that we make, every website we visit, everyplace we go.”

“the whole flavor and quality of the American representative government turns to ashes on the tongue, if one regards that government as simply an inferior and rather second-rate sort of corporation.”

Ifs Whole Government Turns Quality Regard Rate Tongue Corporations Representatives Ashes Inferiors Flavor Second Rate Representative Government

Book:The Folks at Home

Source: The Folks at Home

“We are moving into a world of unaccountable and secretive corporations that manage all our communications and work hand in hand with governments to make us visible to them. Our privacy is being strip-mined and hoarded.”

World Hands Government Moving Communication Manage Corporations Visible Privacy Hand In Hand Secretive

Author:Rebecca Solnit

“Democracy entails a correlation between the public interest as expressed by a majority of the population and the governmental policies that affect them. The term encompasses various manifestations, including direct, participatory and representative democracy, but Governments must be responsive to people and not to special interests such as the military-industrial complex, financial bankers and transnational corporations. Democracy is inclusive and does not privilege an anthropological aristocracy.”

“... between government, business, and the public, there is a triangular community of interest. Clearly, it is in business' interest to shape its behavior to prevailing public values; it is more efficient to do so than not to do so. It is also clear that government is the high-cost alternative through which public values are imposed on corporations that do not accurately perceive these values.”

Government Values Interest Community Clear Cost Shapes Behavior Alternatives Perceive Corporations Efficient Prevailing

Author:Juanita M. Kreps

“I don't trust this [american] government to be regulating corporations. I trust big business to be regulated [by itself] and to be a party to a decent solution.”

Bigs Government Party Solutions Corporations Decent Don't Trust Big Business American Government

Author:Ezra Klein

“Right now, the technological world plus God or spirituality is evolving. I think America has become a little bit too corrupt, government's a little too corrupt, too greedy. Many corporations are too greedy. The labor unions are too greedy. That effects charities and religious organizations. I just think it's greed. That's why, in 1985, I had to figure out how to give before I received. The more I focus on giving, for less and less, the more and more I make.”

“We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism....”

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Government Quotes