Jeff Ament Quotes

Sometimes I'd say what's bad for the country is good for my business, unfortunately.

All businessmen are scum.

There is no friendship in trade.

Some people are the greatest people on Earth with good hearts and will get in the studio and make the most negative music in the world for the sake of success. That's what the music business does to you. That's what capitalism does to you.

Business should never be allowed to justify mean, thug ugly deals for any reason.

There's a lot of bad isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.

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.

The selfish spirit of commerce which knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

Sir, I here enter my solemn protest against a low and calculating avarice entering this hall of legislation. It is only fit for shops and counting houses.

It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community.

One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works. And the economists, for the most part, have sucked up to that money.

Avarice, the spur of industry.

Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.

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.

In the military, they give medals for people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may survive. In business, we give bonuses to people who sacrifice others.

I feel that the world is increasingly about the bottom line, and not so much about human respect or human dignity. In that regard, people who care about other people will not be in a position to make choices and do things that other people who they're competing against will get to do.

If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.

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.

And sometimes I actually start to think human life is just as cheap to corporate America as animal life, so long as there are big profits to be made.

I'm not interested in business for business's sake.

Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.

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.

You have to understand: the narrative that people have about business and capitalism is that they are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and exploitative. Of course, I don't agree with that narrative.

As a group, anthropologists are not too fond of people who work in the business world.

The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade and dickering, not principle.