GOOD MONEY
SAYINGS & QUOTES

A statement more than 100 years ahead of its time:

"Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

For those who dismiss the idea of corporate social responsibility:

"A closed mind is a dying mind."

Edna Ferber

Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): "Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization?"

Gandhi: "I think it would be a good idea."

For those who say that the bottom line in business is all that counts:

"Not everything that can be counted, counts; and not everything that counts can be counted."

Einstein

For those who dispair that the corporate responsibility movement will ever succeed:

"Although social change cannot come overnight, we must always work as though it were a possibility in the morning."

What would happen if business was based upon a non-zero-sum game, rather than a zero-sum game:

There is an ancient Eastern (note, not Western) fable about a man who was given permission to see both heaven and hell while he was alive. He first chose to see hell. He found, to his surprise, an enormous gathering of people at a feast. Each was seated at a long table, covered with every imaginable delicacy. Nevertheless, the people were crying and wailing loudly, and they all appeared to be starving to death. As the man looked over this scene, he saw that the handles of the eating utensils were so long that the people at the table could not bring the food to their mouths.
With a heavy heart, the man left hell to visit heaven, where he found an almost identical scene: a table laden with food and utensils with long handles. But these people were laughing and rejoicing. Rather than trying to feed only themselves, the people in heaven were feeding each other."

A classic for all times:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on
U.S. policy on the war on terrorism at a Pentagon briefing:

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know that we don't know. But there are also unknowns unknowns. These are things we don't know we don't know."

How quickly we forget:

"We have always known that heedless self-interest is bad morals; we know now that it is [also] bad economics."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the height of the U.S. depression in 1936.

For those who believe that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few is not a problem:

"Money, the life-blood of the nation
Corrupts and stagnates in the veins
Unless a proper circulation
Its motion and its heat maintains."

18th Century satirist Jonathan Swift

How corporate responsibility pays off for company stake-holders:

"It's easy to be cynical. It's tempting to reach for the passing short-term gain of a patent infringement, a callous treatment of employees, an indifference to the community where you're located, an exploitive deal with a customer in urgent need of your product. Long term, it's a net loss. It results in the creative executive who goes elsewhere, the lathe operator who works listlessly, the customer whose door is closed the next time you visit."

For those who are skeptical about socially responsible investing and business practices:

"There are three steps in the revelation of any truth; in the first, it is ridiculed; in the second, resisted; in the third, it is considered self-evident."