Shirley Chisholm Quotes

Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable.

It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. What is true is that honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune.

I don't think 'Profit' is devoid of morality. He's just on a different plane than the rest of us.

Commerce is against morality. Morality is going to lose every time.

Capitalism without Judaism, Christianity, or some other moral basis is just pure greed.

Corporations are not capable of doing things out of the goodness of their hearts. They don’t have hearts.

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

My feeling is that the hero has now been defined by phrases like the odious one that we were all raised with - crimes does not pay. Of course it pays, you schmuck. That's not why we don't do it. We don't do it because it is wrong.

I feel that the world is increasingly about the bottom line, and not so much about human respect or human dignity. In that regard, people who care about other people will not be in a position to make choices and do things that other people who they're competing against will get to do.

You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact.

All those men have their price.

Do business managers have a commitment to anything more than the success of their company and to making money? It would be hard to say that they do. Indeed, many business leaders deny that there is any conflict between self-interest and the interests of all.

While I am a capitalist at heart and I have no problems with commercialization as such, I believe that while it's okay if education becomes a profitable business, it's not okay if it becomes corrupt.

Where there is politics or economics, there is no morality

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

If the end does not justify the means, what does?

I’ll stop demonizing business when business stops putting their profits before the country and starts putting their workers before their greed.

The public be damned. What does the public care for railroads except to get as much out of them for as small a consideration as possible? I don't take any stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody's good but our own, because we are not. When we make a move, we do it because it is in our interest to do so, and not because we expect to do somebody else good.

Many government officials have very high moral standards at the beginning of their duties, but after a while some officials sway from the right path and easily fall into the temptation of bribery and fraud.

… how easily moral courage and common decency can be subverted by political expediency.

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.

I know many businesspeople in Russia who have knowingly signed up to effectively compromise their values for their own profit motive to become part of this criminal apparatus in Russia.

Capitalism doesn't care about sentimentality.

I started a software company with a couple other folks. It went public. We made plenty of money. And I thought it was this incredible mission, but in fact, we sold software to Haliburton; we sold software to Frito-Lay and Pepsi and all these companies that didn't necessarily do good things.

Businessmen in society are not going to be the ones that promote anything outside of money.