Stephen Colbert Quotes

The corporation is an out-of-control Frankenstein.

When do corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country.

Corporations are a good thing. But corporations should not be running our government... They have driven the American economy since its founding, and the prosperity of our country is largely dependent on the free operation of corporations. But some corporations don't want free markets, and they don't want democracy. They want profits.

Let's face it: we live at a time when government is less and less powerful, less and less effective, and the agent of social change, at least for the immediate future, is the corporation.

Killing Intel, I, I just had to resign from the Apple Board.

By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

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

If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.

I'm a corporate thug. That's the best way to be.

The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined now.

I'd shrink government in a minute, if I could shrink GM, Bank of America, and all these immoral corporations that operate by an undemocratic code, with no soul and no conscience.

The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic.

My own feeling is that a corporation has no right to have a political or social influence.

We need fair rules of the road, so big corporations can't use their power to gain unfair advantages.

They are involve in producing products and there are different kinds of people running them, but the principle is the same. A corporation shouldn't have the right. Under American law as its developed over the past century, corporation do have personal rights, but I think that's a very negative development.

I don't believe corporations are people.

The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation's corporate structures and regulatory oversight.

Lucy Kellaway's columns in the 'Financial Times' lend themselves to podcasts because they usually consist of her giving a brisk ticking off to some CEO or subversively wondering whether we're really as busy as we pretend we are.

The founders understood that concentrations of power in either government or the economy are dangerous, threatening the rule of the people. That’s why they curbed monopolies and strictly limited the corporate form, largely confining its use to educational institutions and churches and sometimes public-works projects. They wanted the people to govern the nation, not an elite, whether that elite resided in government or business.

There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.

The institution of private property... is undergoing, at this time, a strain never put on it before. Not because the corporation, in essence, is retrogressive or unrepublican, but because in fact, it is unrepublican, and for that reason retrogressive also.

A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image.

The government is a functionary of the corporations - and there's nothing new about that. You can find people in the 1930s talking about the army basically working for Wall Street in all of these countries [it invades].

Yeah, this country's founding fathers are a bunch of dead rich white men, but they did set things up so you could come and sit at the table, so don't piss in the finger bowls, all right? Thank you. In return for unfettered economic opportunity and no government death squads, try to get along with your new stepmotherland, and don't be resentful if there's a set of house rules already in place.

I agree with Peter Drucker that the culture and legal systems of the United Statesare especially favorable to shareholder interests, compared to other interests and compared to most other countries. Indeed, there are many other countries where any good going to public shareholders has a very low priority and almost every other constituency stands higher in line.