Charles Dickens Quotes

Corporations are social organizations, the theater in which men and women realize or fail to realize purposeful and productive lives.

The average bright young man who is drafted hates the whole business because an army always tries to eliminate the individual differences in men.

We need to have business leaders who live by deep, strong principles.

At a lot of companies founded on principles, the notion of making money is almost antithetical to the ethos of the place. From the very beginning, our business has existed to meet the needs and desires of multiple constituencies: customers, team members, vendors, shareholders, the community.

I was not very keen on joining the family business... there were 14 family members working together, and it worried me that I would not have enough individuality.

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

The business world worships mediocrity. Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it.

Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

Corporate executives are not all that conservative….They are not interested in the social issues and the big boys and girls are not interested in fighting regulation because that’s what keeps the little boys and girls from becoming big boys and girls.

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.

Leaders must be reminded that Businesses exist for the service of men.

All businesses that create wealth, pay their taxes and comply with the law are, by definition, good companies.

In an over-organized society, the individual is altogether crushed out of existence. He gains the whole wealth of social thought around him and loses his own soul.

It's appropriate for people to pursue their profit motive in business. If you want to change that, you're going against human nature. But when it comes to setting the rules or creating the institutions, then you should have the general interest at heart.

Trust and transparency, the great principles of the free market, are at stake here.

Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike.

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.

A free enterprise system that is not underlaid with values is bankrupt.

You're used to seeing values listed on waiting-room walls. Communication, integrity, excellence, and respect. Those were actually Enron's values.

Culture is what happens when the CEO isn't in the room.

The bar for a chief executive of a public corporation to repudiate a United States president is extraordinarily high. Corporate leaders aren't given their power, prestige, responsibility, and nine-figure pay packages to use the corner office as their personal soapbox.

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has long been used as an effective lens through which to examine the actions business can take toward ensuring mutual long-term well-being and sustainability.

A corporation that is publicly traded, it has one goal: to make money. It doesn't have a soul. If it does have a soul, it comes from the people who run it.

If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn't have done it.

The collective comes before the individual.