35 Corporate Quotes

Never work for a company that says people are its most important asset. If you wanted to get a mortgage and you said that your only asset was people you would end up living in a tent.

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

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

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.

John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.

Appraisals are where you get together with your team leader and agree what an outstanding member of the team you are, how much your contribution has been valued, what massive potential you have and, in recognition of all this, would you mind having your salary halved.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

The people with money to build today are corporations -- they are our popes and Medicis. The sense of pride is why they build.

His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: 'No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.'

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the coporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this.

It would be a great abuse of my position to write that it was Northwest Airlines that treated us in this shoddy and inexcusable way, so I won't.

But much more vicious than these cases is the majority of foreign correspondents who never have to be placed against the wall, who are never told what to write and how to write it, but who know from contact with the great minds of the press lords or from the simple deduction that the bosses are in big business and the news must be slanted accordingly, or from the general intangible atmosphere which prevails everywhere, what they can do and what they must never do. The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, 'I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like.'

In earlier days there were times when senior management at Radio One seemed to be rather surprised that I walked upright and used knives and forks.

What I am describing is not only a society dominated by corporatist structures, but by the received wisdom of a corporatist atmosphere: one in which the elites are interest-driven, whatever their jobs. And so the society is gradually being redrawn to suit this ethic-free system.

You're dealing with the phone company, Mr. Veedle. We are not bound by city, state, or federal regulations. We are omnipotent.

Canada got one break in the Walkerton tragedy: the deadly contamination of the Ontario town's water supply, which killed seven people in the summer of 2000, came from cow manure. If the contamination had come instead from, say, a toxic chemical produced by a foreign company, that would have been worse. Then the company might well have sued Canada for hundreds of millions of dollars.

The intern had also discovered a vague little article from the late Sixties saying that Basco had put some 'junk machinery' on the floor of the Harbor, giving the usual feeble excuse. 'They claim that this junk was going to become a habitat for marine life. You don't buy that?' Bless her, she did know how to blow my lid. 'Rebecca, goddamnit, since the beginning of time, every corporation that has ever thrown any of its shit into the ocean has claimed that it was going to become a habitat for marine life. It's the goddamn ocean, Rebecca. That's where all the marine life is. Of course it's going to become a habitat for marine life.'

...evidence-based approach, the U.S. negotiators argued, is interference with free markets, because corporations must have the right to deceive. [...] the claim itself is kind of amusing, I mean, even if you believe the free market rhetoric for a moment. The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That's what's so wonderful about it. But that's the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that, which brings us back to the viability of American democracy. For many years, elections here, election campaigns, have been run by the public relations industry and each time it's with increasing sophistication. And quite naturally, the industry uses the same technique to sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs. The point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information, and similarly, to undermine democracy by same method, projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information. The candidates are trained, carefully trained, to project a certain image. Intellectuals like to make fun of George Bush's use of phrases like 'misunderestimate,' and so on, but my strong suspicion is that he's trained to do that. He's carefully trained to efface the fact that he's a spoiled frat boy from Yale, and to look like a Texas roughneck kind of ordinary guy just like you, just waiting to get back to the ranch that they created for him...

There's one aspect of the right-wing fury about cutting off Imus that I agree with. They argue, I suppose rightly, that Imus was pulled off because of pressure from advertisers. Correct me if I missed something, but in the coverage and debate over this matter I failed to notice the observation that it is indeed wrong for advertisers to have any influence whatsoever on media content, one of the aspects in which the media depart very far from any ideal of freedom of press.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

It's not a real choice. It's an apparent choice. Like choosing a brand of detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide, they're both owned by Proctor & Gamble This doesn't mean that one takes a position that is without nuance, that [...] the Democrats and Republicans are the same. Of course, they're not. Neither are Tide and Ivory Snow. Tide has oxy-boosting and Ivory Snow is a gentle cleanser.'

The whole ideology of indie rock doesn't hold any water anymore; it's not that clear-cut. Every time we sell a record, Time Warner gets a dime from our distributor. I already give a ridiculous amount of my income to the United States government, which is probably the most evil organization on the planet as far as killing people; I don't know how many bombs I've purchased with my tax dollars. Unless you're gonna live on a mountain somewhere, you're not gonna be free of the modern world and all the evils that go with it. What you can do is operate with intelligence and be compassionate, help people when you can. Do things not just for money, but for the craft of it.

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

'Hello, and welcome to Monday Nyquil, where the big boys play with each other. Tonight we've got a good show lined up. First I'm gonna fire someone on the phone, just like Steve Austin.'

The great goal of the backlash is to nurture a cultural class war, and the first step in doing so, as we have seen, is to deny the economic basis of social class. After all, you can hardly deride liberals as society's 'elite' or present the GOP as the party of the common man if you acknowledge the existence of the corporate world - the power that creates the nation's real elite, that dominates its real class system, and that wields the Republican Party as its personal political system.

We are not imitating Hitler and Mussolini. They are imitating us. They have just discovered what we knew for centuries: that a corporate, collectivist system pays.

The tradition of 'turkey pardoning' in the US is a wonderful allegory for new racism. Every year, the National Turkey Federation presents the US president with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the president spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. That's how new racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys - the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) - are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically, they're for the pot. But the fortunate fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the World Trade Organisation - so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee - so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?

One of the greatest pieces of advice I've ever gotten in my life was from my mom. When I was a little kid there was a kid who was bugging me in school. And she said, 'Okay, I'm going to tell you what to do.' She said, 'This kid's bugging you. He puts his hands on you, you pick up the nearest rock, or whatever you can get your hands on, and you lay him out.' And I did! And I felt better. And it worked... So, for me, that was a great lesson because someone had invaded my space; invaded my being, you know, and was doing something against me that I didn't want to be done. So I took control of the situation and ran with it. And many years later, after being turned into a product by a very huge corporation that had their hands all over me and I couldn't escape it, I promised myself that I would continue to move forward and do my best not to compromise in any way whatsoever; not allow anyone to put their hands on me and affect me in that way. So that's the best advice that I could give, is just to keep moving forward, and don't give a shit what anybody thinks, you know. Just keep moving forward and do what you have to do for you.

'A couple of weeks ago, when Eric Bischoff told his secretary to tell her secretary to leave a message on my answering machine for me to call Eric Bischoff, and then I called Eric Bischoff, and he proceeded to fire me over the phone, I thought a big cloud was lifted off the career of Steve Austin. Because gone were the days when I would walk up to someone and say, 'hey, what about me and Sting? We got this big thing goin', how about the cage?' and someone says, '(as Dusty Rhodes) no, baby, that's for somebody else. We're just gonna keep you right where you're at right now.' I said, 'well, how about me and Savage? I've got this great idea: he comes in, he's got the Slim Jim deal. Well, hell, I got--' 'no, Steve, that's for somebody else, baby.' Then you go, 'I got this great idea we could do with Hulk Hogan. I'm gonna be the Steve-amaniac and we're gonna take this thing all the way, because Hulk Hogan--Hulkamania was the biggest thing to ever come down wrestling's pike,' and they say 'no, that's not for you, brother; you can't do that. We're gonna keep you right where you are.'I said 'how about me and Brian get back together? The Hollywood Blondes was the best tag team to come along in ten years!' and they say, 'no, Steve. We need you in a singles role, man. We need you to do this: we're gonna put the U.S. Title on you, and then we're gonna take you here, and then you're the #1 contender, and then you've got this World Title shot,' well all that shit never happened! So there I am, flounderin' along, there's nothin' goin' my way because the politics in WCW kept the biggest potential superstar in wrestling, on the goddamn ground! What are you supposed to do? On one hand (looks at left hand), they're payin' you a bunch of money. They're paying me a bunch of money! And on this hand (looks at right hand), they're telling me, 'hey, go out there and give Bagwell a hell of a match. Go out there with an 18-year-old German kid, give him seven good minutes. Let the people see what he can do.' They say you are what you eat. In WCW, they didn't feed me nothin' but garbage, so I let myself become garbage. I became complacent with everything that they said, as long as big Ted kept sendin' in the checks. Maybe I wasn't happy with what was goin' on, but I became complacent. Then they send me to Japan, the big injury. Bischoff delivers the shot heard around the damn world. Steve Austin's out of a high-paying job. All of a sudden, the phone starts ringing off the hook. It's ECW, it's the WWF, it's All Japan, it's New Japan, and all Steve Austin's gotta do is make a decision. Tod Gordon, whether he mortgaged his house one time...two times...maybe three times, came up with the right figure for Steve Austin to make a decision. I strolled into the ECW Arena. It's the biggest piece of crap I've ever seen. I broke in in a building called the Sportatorium in Dallas, Texas, home of the world famous Von Erichs. Anybody that was anybody stepped foot in the Dallas Sportatorium. For the last two years, all you've heard about, anywhere in wrestling, is the famous ECW Arena. Debut night, I roll in. You got the Sandman, you got the Raven, you got the Pitbulls, you got Stevie Richards, you got the Public Enemy, you got the Gangstas, you got Mipey Whipwreck, whatever the hell his name is. You got a bunch of damn misfits running around thinking that they can actually wrestle. All I've seen in ECW is a bunch of violent crap. And that's exactly what I call it, because that's exactly what it is. Steve Austin is here to wrestle. It's what I do best. It's what I do better than anybody in the world. Dean Malenko... Eddie Guerrero... they got the big send-off. Tears were in everybody's eyes, it was a big deal. All Steve Austin got was a good swift kick in the ass as Bischoff hung up the phone and left me high and dry. There's no Hogans here. There's no Flairs here. There's not a Dusty Rhodes, and there damn sure isn't an Eric Bischoff here. There's no one that can hold back Steve Austin now. 'Stunning'? Tossed it out the window. Never was meant to be. ECW's gonna find out firsthand what Steve Austin can do. And I'm gonna show everybody here exactly what a true superstar is supposed to do. What a true superstar is supposed to be. Because no-one here can hold back. Not Tod Gordon, not Hulk Hogan, not Eric Bischoff...nobody. I'm gonna be the superstar that I always knew that I could be. Because there's no one...no one in ECW that can stop me.' - first promo in ECW