Page 116 - The Big Book of Business Quotations: Over 1,400 of the Smartest Things Ever Said about Making Money - PDFDrive.com
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Profit, Money, and Greed
Money can be used for good and bad. Corporations need to make a profit to
stay in business, and employees need to be sufficiently paid in order to keep
working. But at some point, accumulating money stops being a productive
incentive and morphs into greed. This fault line surely predates the “robber
barons” who emerged during the Industrial Revolution. To a widening segment
of the population, yesteryear’s robber barons are today’s “one-percenters”—
hedge fund billionaires and Wall Street CEOs. And now, the “greed-is-good”
zeitgeist of the late twentieth century has given way to the Occupy Wall Street
movement and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign—twenty-first-century
developments fueled by wide economic disparity and income inequality. The
following quotes convey all these perspectives on money within the economic
sphere.
A corporation’s primary goal is to make money. Government’s primary role is to
take a big chunk of that money and give it to others.
—Larry Ellison, cofounder of Oracle Corp.
