Edward Coke Quotes

We have to raise the bar on corporate governance. Shareholders want ethical behavior and honesty.

We will always put our values before our bottom line.

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.

They [corporations] cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.

Corporations are people.

None of us believe that in order to run a business, you have to leave your humanity at home.

Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix.

As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.

Everybody who was involved in that culture [Wells Fargo] should be held accountable.

They [corporations] feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.

In America, we no longer have an institutionalized, organized way of calling business to task - of taking them to account for what they've done - and this is especially true in the cultural realm.

Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality.

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.

There are bad people and there are bad corporations. Just as there are good people and good corporations. That might seem too black and white, but what can I tell ya?

Corporate executives and business owners need to realize that there can be no compromise when it comes to ethics, and there are no easy shortcuts to success. Ethics need to be carefully sown into the fabric of their companies.

'Power Play' is a morality tale for our post-Enron world and - not incidentally - wildly entertaining. Nothing wrong with that.

Punctuality is the soul of business.

We know no one is perfect, but what we cannot tolerate, what we will never accept, is a person or company that knows dangers exists and says nothing - literally, silence can kill.

I never hurt anybody in this business, ever.

The blanket assertion that corporations are people obfuscates the complex issues at play in the changing business world. Corporation are institutions. People are people.

People should be encouraged by things like awards given for corporate governance practices.

Ken Lay has, does and will continue to accept responsibility for the fall of Enron. He was the man at the controls. But failure is not a crime.

If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court wishes us to believe, they are stunningly unpatriotic ones.

Industry leaders have the power to set standards.

Corporations are not capable of doing things out of the goodness of their hearts. They don’t have hearts.