Private Profit Quotes

There is only one war I am interested in making—making war against the private munitions makers the world over.

Beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for the building up of private power.

...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.

In a capitalist system, there's a principle that if you invest, especially in a long-term risky investment, if something comes out of it, you're supposed to get the profit. It doesn't happen in our system. The taxpayer paid for it and gets nothing - assumes all of the risk, gets zero. The money goes into the pockets of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who are ripping off decades of work in the public sector.

If one individual, or one class, can call in the aid of authority to ward off the effects of competition, it acquires a privilege and at the cost of the whole community; it can make sure of profits not altogether due to the productive services rendered, but composed in part of an actual tax upon consumers for its private profit' which tax it commonly shares with the authority that thus unjustly lent its support.

Officials are under a constant temptation to misuse their power for the private profit of themselves or others.

The first sign of tyranny is government's complicity in privatizing the commons for private gain.

It seems to me intolerable to allow private people to use public capital in order to make a guaranteed profit for themselves .... If private citizens won’t supply munitions of war at a reasonable profit and take pot luck with the rest of the citizens in the matter of taxation, then the government ought to build its own plants and conscript the necessary managers to run them.

If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who thinks he actually owns the news you get, it is against the national interest.

We have lost control over our own power. We have surrendered the decisions about where electricity is sold—and for how much, to private companies with only one objective: maximizing unheard-of profits.

Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior.

... it is a commonplace that men like war. For peace, in our society, with the feeling we have then that it is feeble-minded to strive except for one's own private profit, is a lonely thing and a hazardous business. Over and over men have proved that they prefer the hazards of war with all its suffering. It has its compensations.

The prison industrial complex is perhaps, at least domestically, the most striking example of us putting profit before people. It all stems from one basic misunderstanding: that the public good can be shepherded by private interests.

Both rich and poor nations have a common stake in policies that put the globe on a sustainable development path. The conflict is less between poor and rich countries than between the broad interests of people and the narrow interests of extractive industries. We need to find our way towards some kind of global regime that reduces emissions of the greenhouse gases, but well-off nations need to transfer the technology to make this possible, rather than viewing this shift as one more opportunity for private industry to profit.

Now that private prison companies have found that they can make a killing on mass incarceration, these private prison companies are now in the business of building detention centers for suspected illegal immigrants.

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

So long as we maintain a substantial private sector, therefore socialists must logically applaud the accumulation of private profit.

No one can deny that much of our modern advertising is essentially dishonest; and it can be maintained that to lie freely and all the time for private profit is not to abuse the right of free speech, whether it is a violation of the law or not. But again the practical question is, how much lying for private profit is to be permitted by law?

So there's always been this clash between what is the public good - that which belongs to all of us in common - and what can be exploited for a private interest.

Where no man thinks himself under any obligation to submit to another, and, instead of co-operating in one great scheme, every one hastens through by-paths to private profit, no great change can suddenly be made; nor is superior knowledge of much effect, where every man resolves to use his own eyes and his own judgment, and every one applauds his own dexterity and diligence, in proportion as he becomes rich sooner than his neighbour.

For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.

Men in their private capacities may be allowed to prefer their single profit, but should consult only the general good in public councils.

Private citizens and companies are always seen as evil and greedy, because they want to profit. But the government picks your pocket any chance it can get, but they're never called greedy.

We've so, so fallen for the premise that only government can do certain things. But then when we get around to privatizing, people always applaud it. Well, I mean, the left never does. Privatize this; privatize that. Prisons, you name it. When you are endeavoring to create wealth by virtue of creating profit, you're gonna have a much more efficient operation a bunch of bureaucrats - who have no idea what they're doing, by the way.

They’re everywhere, and it’s not a mistake. These are private companies building private algorithms for private ends.... Algorithms were built by private companies and sold to the government institutions. They call it their “secret sauce” — that’s why they can’t tell us about it. It’s also private power. They are profiting for wielding the authority of the inscrutable.