Peter Coyote Quotes

I have always felt that public, commercial and community organisations should be as open as possible about their affairs. They need to be accountable to their owners, their customers, their members and communities and other interest groups.

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.

Most of the big banks were shot through with short-termism, deceptive practices and self-dealing. We must institute basic changes in corporate governance and in management practice to restore responsibility and honesty for the sake of the economy and for the self-respect of the country.

Executives can no longer hide behind the corporate veil. They need to be accountable for what their companies do, because entities are responsible for socially irresponsible behavior.

Shareholder meetings are not usually the occasion for utter candor - or for that matter, arch sarcasm - by chief executives.

Not only is self-regulation largely a fantasy, but repeated scandals across multiple industries have proved that companies are fundamentally incapable of self-regulating for the greater good.

I don't represent corporations.

I'm a cynic about corporate democracy and boards.

There is a broad movement that has been holding companies accountable on human rights for a long time.

I often say that shareholders should feel very responsible for how responsive corporations are to the public trust.

I really believe that all CEO pay should be voted on by shareholders ahead of time. Mine was.

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

Shareholders have the right and obligation to set the parameters of corporate behavior within which management pursues profit.

Only the corporation that shirks from the light would have anything to fear from government. About the welfare of such corporations we need not be over-sensitive.

We demand that big business give the people a square deal; in return we must insist that when anyone engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall himself be given a square deal.

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

Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism …. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.

As a pro-business Democrat, I understand the obligations of publicly traded companies to maximize returns to shareholders.

You can't just let companies self-regulate, and I've gotta think they get that, too.

The days of CEOs getting rich while shareholders lose has got to end. Management must be accountable.

When Facebook went public, they didn't have a particularly strong model of governance.

We invited HP executives to participate in the management and in the board. HCL had this concept of corporate officers since inception in 1999. We had a remuneration committee. Now everyone is talking about nomination and remuneration committee. We had this from 1999.

At D.O.J., we don't want to go after the corporate wrongdoers simply as an end unto itself; we want to decrease the amount of corporate wrongdoing that happens in the first place. We want to restore and help protect the corporate culture of responsibility.

Every technology company should have a red button somewhere in the headquarters where, if they realize they've caused more societal harm than they expected and done more harm than good, they press the button, and the company dissolves instantly.

None of us are going to fix governance; it may just be beyond repair. But you can fix capitalism. And the reason you can fix capitalism - It is inherently numerical, and as a result, it is inherently objective. It can be done objectively.