Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

We can't have these great corporations crowding competition off the sidewalks. It's like an elephant saying, "Everyone for himself," as he dances among the chickens.

Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.

More than half the world's largest 100 economies are corporations. They have no loyalties to place or citizens.

The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.

There seems to be something sacrosanct about big business.

We are ruled by big business and the government as its paid hireling … the divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of CEOs.

I do not dread these corporations as instruments of power to destroy this country, because there are a thousand agencies which can regulate, restrain and control them.

To control the American market is to own America.

We need reform, but not at the hands of Wall Street.

With deregulation, one sector of the economy after another is "liberated" to capital's unmonitored authority. The very notion that there is a public interest is contested…. Deregulation has been, above all else, a means of reducing corporate business's accountability to the public.

… the rules of big business … have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you: and remember that the best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical, for its exploitation”

Free markets were supposed to lead to free societies. Instead, today’s supercharged global economy is eroding the power of the people in democracies around the globe. Welcome to a world where the bottom line trumps the common good and government takes a back seat to big business.

When you come before us and tell us that we are to disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course. We say to you that you have made the definition of the business man too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer.

Very often, I think about the people that I represent. I meet people who have thousands and thousands of employees and millions and millions of customers - and also make a lot of money. But I think about the millions of Europeans that I represent in order to try to balance that so we can meet on more equal terms.

Big corporations don't just belong to one person or two persons but to a whole nation. If you let big corporations fail, then a lot of people are going to suffer.

Citizens need to know how their countries are being run so that they can hold governments and big business to account.

We need to be fearful of companies that get so big that they can actually be directing policy.

I'm not against the corporations. They are our wealth. But they are getting too greedy. I don't want to do away with corporations. I want them to make our cars, however, not our laws.

Deregulation has been, above all else, a means of reducing corporate business's accountability to the public.

With less competition, corporations can use their power to raise prices, limit choice for consumers, cut wages for workers, crowd out start-ups and small businesses.

The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.

We Have Got To Bring Corporate America To Its Knees

I think the greedy corporate owners have to be confronted with the fact that they are ignoring their most powerful resource - their workers.