Quotations: Corporations

'We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories."

Cecil Rhodes, "founder" of Rhodesia

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" The recent quantum leap in the ability of transnational corporations to relocate their facilities around the world in effect makes all workers, communities and countries competitors for these corporations' favor. The consequence is a "race to the bottom" in which wages and social conditions tend to fall to the level of the most desperate."

Jeremy Brecher

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"To attract companies like yours ... we have felled mountains, razed jungles, filled swamps, moved rivers, relocated towns ... all to make it easier for you and your business to do business here."

Philippine government ad in Fortune magazine

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"Today's business corporation is an artificial creation, shielding owners and managers while preserving corporate privilege and existence. Artificial or not, corporations have won more rights under the law than people have -- rights which government has protected with armed force."

Richard Grossman and Frank Adams

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"The corporation has evolved to serve the interests of whoever controls it, at the expense of whoever does not."

William Dugger

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"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."

Howard Scott

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'We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

Louis Brandeis

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"There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past."

Noam Chomsky

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"An economic system can remain viable only so long as society has mechanisms to counter abuses of either state or market power and the erosion of the natural, social, and moral capital that such abuses commonly exacerbate."

David Korten

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"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

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"The national interest is not to protect individual American firms but to preserve a system of business ... The American empire expresses its presence and exercises its influence through the capitalist mode of operation for which it keeps as much of the world "open" a possible."

Henry Pachter

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"It is impossible for the world economy to grow its way out of poverty and environmental degradation.... As the economic subsystem grows it incorporates an even greater proportion of the total ecosystem into itself and must reach a limit at 100 percent, if not before."

Herman Daly

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'What an astounding thing to watch a civilization destroy itself because it is unable to re-examine the validity under totally new circumstances of an economic ideology."

Sir James Goldsmith

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" Before NAFTA we thought corporations could only buy Southern governments. Now we see they also buy Northern governments."

Ignacio Peon Escalante, Mexican Action Network on Free Trade

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" Corporate executives dream of a global market made up of people with homogenized tastes and needs.... Logos on bottles, boxes, and labels are global banners, instantly recognizable by millions who could not tell you the color of the U.N. flag."

Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh

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" They no longer use bullets and ropes. They use the World Bank and the IMF."

Jesse Jackson

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"In this new world market ... billions can flow in or out of an economy in seconds. So powerful has this force of money become that some observers now see the hot-money set becoming a sort of shadow world government -- one that is irretrievably eroding the concept of the sovereign powers of a nation state."

Business Week magazine

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