Noam Chomsky Quotes

From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants' books.

Earning money is not a sin, and the bottom line is growth.

I'm a businessman, and I think there's nothing wrong with being a businessman provided you have the right headspace and do good things with the money you make.

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

The secret of my success is that I make other people money. And, never ever, ever, ever be ashamed about trying to earn as much as possible for yourself, if the person you're working with is also making money. That's life!

My only loyalty is to what's best for business, not to any set of constituents.

Far too many executives have become more concerned with the 'four P's' - pay, perks, power and prestige - rather than making profits for shareholders.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

[Corporate] takeovers are for the public good, but that's not why I do it. I do it to make money.

Some shareholders believe it is all about price and a few people's pockets.

Remember that banks aren't markets. The market is amoral. The market doesn't care who you are. You're a trade to the market. The market will sell you if they think you're riskier.

When I bought companies, it was done on trust, on a one-on-one basis, and with the intention of taking care of employees. Today, it's about who can bid the highest. There's no personal interest. It's a different world and one that an entrepreneur like me doesn't like much.

Sometimes, I had very little - if any - idea for whom I was really working: at the end of the day, who reaped the profits? Was it a privately controlled German foundation or a global array of stockholders? A middle-class guy on the Upper West Side or Rupert Murdoch? Were we pursuing mere profit, or self-perpetuation, or something bigger?

In reality, no one on Wall Street cares about anything except performance.

I want to prove every day that liberal talkers can be successful at business.

In fact, of all hoodoos in Wall Street I think the resolve to induce the stock market to act as a fairy godmother is the busiest and most persistent.

All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.

We believe there should be a huge area between everything you should do and everything you can do without getting into legal trouble. I don't think you should come anywhere near that line. We don't deserve much credit for this. It helps us make more money. I'd like to believe that we'd behave well even if it didn't work. But more often, we've made extra money from doing the right thing. Ben Franklin said I'm not moral because of it's the right thing to do - but because it's the best policy.

You think that the only thing that counts is the bottom line! What a presumptuous thing to say. The bottom line is in heaven.

I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from the base-line - their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit - profits extracted at the cost of life.

Our business is not based on having information about you. You’re not our product. Our product are these, and this watch, and Macs and so forth. And so we run a very different company. I think everyone has to ask, how do companies make their money? Follow the money. And if they’re making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data, I think you have a right to be worried.

I think what you've seen them do recently in the markets is what most of us learn doesn't ultimately work. But I think everyone has to figure that on their own.

The banker rubs his nose, thinking of his cat stalking something on the lawn.

I think we're fooling ourselves if we think that regulators are going to be able to outsmart the bankers. So, the task of designing regulatory reform is trying to make more or less foolproof regulation and that's one of the advantages of the systemic category.

Greenmail, in case you're wondering, is when a company pays a raider a premium for his holdings-if he'll go away. What I think it really is is blackmail in a pin-striped suit.