Norman Lear Quotes

Talking about corporations - they're so big. There's not a person at a corporation.

Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.

I think shareholders are the great evil of this modern world.

This great oracle of the East India Company himself admits that, if there is no power vested in the Court of Directors but that of the patronage, there is really no government vested in them at all.

Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.

If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job.

It's the way our founding fathers would have wanted it, if they had founded corporations instead of just a country.

Corporations are may lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man.

The great power in America is the corporations - we're a corporate country. We're run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?

Corporation: a miniature totalitarian state governed by a hierarchy of unelected officials who take a dim view of individualism, free speech, equality and eggheads. The backbone of all Western democracies.

Corporations are a good thing. But corporations should not be running our government... They have driven the American economy since its founding, and the prosperity of our country is largely dependent on the free operation of corporations. But some corporations don't want free markets, and they don't want democracy. They want profits.

The institution of private property... is undergoing, at this time, a strain never put on it before. Not because the corporation, in essence, is retrogressive or unrepublican, but because in fact, it is unrepublican, and for that reason retrogressive also.

It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.

The handful of corporations that own most of the media outlets have an interest in reflecting establishment views.

The government is a functionary of the corporations - and there's nothing new about that. You can find people in the 1930s talking about the army basically working for Wall Street in all of these countries [it invades].

What's amazing to me? General Electric has a bigger budget for - special interest budget than all of the oil companies combined, and yet nobody says anything.

Most US corporations today are over-managed and under-led. They need to develop their capacity to exercise leadership.

The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.

The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.

The U.S. is, to a very unusual extent, a business-run society.

I'm not against the corporations. They are our wealth. But they are getting too greedy. I don't want to do away with corporations. I want them to make our cars, however, not our laws.

Shareholders are sort of like cats; they get herded around, and they follow the leader. With the exception of a few activist shareholders, there are a very rare number of big, important, influential shareholders that like to step up and say there's a problem here, especially when they're making money.

The corporations have become our government. They're not just influential. Department by department, you name it, they put their people in high government positions, they have 10,000 PACs and 35,000 lobbyists, so there's no more opening to be heard.

We have a lot of issues with corporate power that have to be addressed. My plan takes us further and it would do the job.

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.