Ralph Steadman Quotes

I just have a serious problem with business for business' sake: this bottom-dollar mentality. I have a serious problem with evil.

Look out for the trusts. I hate to leave you here alone with those dreadful corporations, but I can’t very well help it. Be careful of them and don’t let them hurt you while I am away.

There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded.

Getting back to the point, a guy like Jerry, he deals with the business, and he doesn't see it as being evil or ugly, it's what you have to do, and I mean I know there's some really ugly parts to it and parts which drive me nuts, but not in the same way as music business.

Whatever we want to think about American business - work hard, tell the truth, have morality - it's a myth. There's a lot of graft.

They [Standard Oil] had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me … the open disregard of decent ethical business practices by capitalists.

There is no gaming table in the world where loaded dice are tolerated, no athletic field where men must not start fair. Yet Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair.

Legitimate profit is good. What's bad is profiteering.

My concern is that we live in an economy in which stabbing someone and waiting for them to complain before we remove the knife has become the normal way of doing business. When did we lose sight of the fact that it's not nice to stab people in the first place?

The problem with venality in business is that getting outraged about it makes it easy to miss the systemic problems that venality often disguises.

It can be hard to say if someone has a deliberate intent to defraud or if they are just really, really bad at their business. But even if people are unpublishable, it doesn't mean they should be ripped off.

If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources.

The American people are being victimized more than any free market would warrant.

One can be in business and pursue bad profit. That is, by practicing cronyism—rigging the system to undermine competition, innovation and opportunity, making others worse off. Good profit should lead you to improve your ability to help others improve their lives. But that’s not how many businesses act today.

Sleazy people are always in this business. They run the business, pretty much. There are a lot of barracudas.

In business there's people who have talent and there's people whose talent is to take advantage of people who have talent.

Big business does not want honest government.

International business may conduct its operations with scraps of paper, but the ink it uses is human blood.

The substance of the eminent Socialist gentleman's speech is that making a profit is a sin, but it is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss.

[Americans are] trampled to death beneath the iron heel [of monopolies and trusts.]

Corruption is a punitive tax on those who can least afford it.

The time has come when the Executive branch of this Government must enforce the plain letter of the law and check monopoly, or it must turn the people over boldly into the hands of exploiters grown impudent and ruthlessly aggressive through long years of wanton violation of the law.

Our civilization is built on competition, and competition evolves itself crime to so acute an infatuation has the lunacy of self-interest carried our dominant opinion.

Monopolies, whether private or governmental, are always abused by those who hold them.

Your friends are merely proposing to waste their good money. If I am Governor, whenever business is honest I will encourage it without a hundred thousand dollar bribe. If their business is dishonest, not all the money in Wall Street would influence my attitude toward it. Honest business needs no bribe.