Jonathan Wallace

Here’s a smattering of quotes from books I’ve read. It’s not a comprehensive list; mostly covering which parts left an impression. If I wanted to re-read a book I’d already read, I’d start here.

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“But as governments began to realize their power, so Corporation Man found his defense: it was called “internationalism.” The logic is obvious: all governments need the corporate empire’s investment, especially if it means more jobs and more exports. Once the corporations are truly international, with half or more of their profit coming from overseas activity, they are no longer at the mercy of their national governments.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, white-wash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining in all the flys in the ointment, all the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some pleasant someone else.”
Campbell, Joseph
The Hero with A Thousand Faces

“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”
Carnegie, Dale
How to Win Friends and Influence People

“It’s not what enters men’s mouths that’s evil,” said the alchemist. It’s what comes out that is.”
Coelho, Paul
The Alchemist

“And what went wrong when the other alchemist tried to make gold and were unable to do so?”

“They were looking only for gold,” his companion answered. “They were seeking the treasure of their Personal Legend, without wanting to actually live out the Personal Legend.”
Coelho, Paul
The Alchemist

“Visionary companies mimic the biological evolution of species. We found the concepts in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species to be more helpful in replicating the success of certain visionary companies than any textbook on corporate strategic planning.”
Collins, Jim
Built to Last

“Those who built the visionary companies wisely understood that is better to understand who you are than where you are going–for where you are going will almost certainly change. It is a lesson as relevant to our individual lives as to aspiring visionary companies.”
Collins, Jim
Built to Last

“There is nothing less constant than interest. Today: it unites me to you, tomorrow, it will make me your enemy.”
Durkheim, Emilie
The Division of Labor

“Healthy abdominals are intended to work as back stabilizers, not prime movers.”
Egoscue, Peter
Pain Free

When power shifts hands: “That may lead to a change in emphasis: a moratorium on innovations of the sort the previous government pursued…What it almost never leads to is substantial repeal of the previous round of innovation. This is true in the federal government, and it is true in local government. The Eisenhower administration did not repeal social security; the Reagan administration, for all its rhetoric and its substantial cutbacks in federal social spending, did not abolish the Legal Services Corporation or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commision. Nor is there much reason to believe that would have happened even if Congress had been under full Republican control. Government programs acquire an intertia and a set of constituencies that make repeal look like onerous and politically costly work, even for a newly installed conservative regime that finds them unattractive.”pg. 63
Ehrenhalt, Alan
United States of Ambition

“The emergence of the caucus as an important player reflects the same principles as in Concord: the triumph of talent over ideology. Political success depends more than anything else on how hard a candidate is willing to work, how hard his or her friends are willing to work, and how clever they are at going about the job.”
Ehrenhalt, Alan
United States of Ambition

“The Kantian dualism of what ‘is’ and what ‘ought to be’; seems to Marx — and this view he continued to maintain throughout the rest of his life — totally irreconcilable with the demands of the individual who wishes to apply philosophy to the pursuit of his objectives.”
Giddens, Anthony
Capitalism and modern social theory

“All dogmas must be questioned, whether they are religious or political: ‘Our slogan, therefore, must be: Reform of consciousness, not through dogmas, but through analysis of the mystical consciousness that is unclear about itself, where in religion or politics. It will be evident, then that the world has long dreamed of something of which it only has to become conscious in order to possess it in actuality…To have its sins forgiven, mankind has only to declare them for what they are.”
Giddens, Anthony
Capitalism and modern social theory

“Any and every economic phenomenon is at the same time always a social phenomenon, and the existence of a particular kind of ‘economy’ presupposes a definite kind of society.”
Giddens, Anthony
Capitalism and modern social theory

“Wendt has shown that primitive religions contain two sorts of interrelated phenomena: a set of ‘metaphysical speculations on the nature and order of things’ on the one hand, and rules of conduct and moral discipline on the other. Moreover, through providing ideals to be striven for, religion is a force making for social unity. Durkheim accepts this as a general postulate: these ideals may vary between different societies, ‘but one can be confident that there have never been men who have completely lacked an ideal, however humble it maybe; for this corresponds to a need which is deeply rooted in our nature’. In primitive societies, religion is a strong source of altruism: religious beliefs and practices have the effect of ‘restraining egoism, of inclining man towards sacrifice and disinterestedness’. Religious sentiments attach man to something other than himself, and make him dependent upon superior powers which symbolise the ideal. Individualism, Wundt has show, is a product of social development: for from individuality being the primitive fact, and society the derived fact, the first only slowly emerges from the second.”
Giddens, Anthony
Capitalism and modern social theory

“Sounds reasonable on the face of it–but the decrease has been figured on one base–the pay the men were getting in the first place–while the increase uses a smaller base, the pay level after the cut.”

You can check on this bit of statistical misfiguring by supposing, for simplicity, that the original wage was $1 an hour. Cut twenty per cent, it is down to 80 cents. A five per cent increase on that is 4 cents, which is not one-fourth but one-fifth of the cut. Like so many presumably honest mistakes, this one somehow managed to come out an exaggeration which made a better story.”
Huff, Darrell
How to Lie with Statistics

“Those who control a people’s opinions control its actions. Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as child of the state, trained to ‘consider themselves only in their relationship to the Body of the State’. ‘For being nothing except by it, they will be nothing except for it. It will have all they have and will be all they are.”
Rousseau
Johnson, Paul
Intellectuals

“No opinion should be held with fervour. No one holds with fervour that seven times eight is fifty-six, because it can be known that this is the case. Fervour is only necessary in commending an opinion which is doubtful or demonstrably false.”
Bertrand Russell
Johnson, Paul
Intellectuals

“Edmund Wilson on how a poet should function: ‘In giving supreme expression to profoundly felt personal experience, she was able to identify herself with more general human experience and stand forth as a spokesman for the human spirit, announcing its predicaments, its vicissitudes, but as a master of human expression, by the splendour of expression itself, putting herself beyond common embarrassments, common oppressions and panics.”
Johnson, Paul
Intellectuals

“Chapter 8 ‘The Working Day’ in Capital: What the chapter seeks to argue, and it is the core of Marx’s moral case, is that capitalism, by its very nature, involves the progressive and increasing exploitation of the workers; thus the more capital employed, the more the workers will be exploited, and it is this great moral evil which produces the final crisis. In order to justify his thesis scientifically, he has to prove that, (1) bad as conditions in pre-capitalist workshops were, they have become far worse under industrial capitalism; (2) granted the impersonal, implacable nature of capital, exploitation of workers rises to a crescendo in the most highly capitalized industries.”
Johnson, Paul
Intellectuals

“The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusted meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give no bounties, make equal laws, secure life and property, and you need not give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a fair and just commonwealth, property rushed from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave, and persevering.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Johnson, Paul
Intellectuals

“Wilhelm von Homboldt: only when are placed in a great variety of circumstances that these experiments can take place which expand the range of values with which the human race is familiar, and it is through expanding this range that increasingly better answers can be found to the question, ‘In exactly what ways are men to arrange their lives?”
Lindsey, Brink
The Age of Abundance

“On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by mass affluence but who, at the same time, were hostile to the social institutions responsible for creating those possibilities. On the right, meanwhile, rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing. One side denounced capitalism but gobbled up its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.”
Lindsey, Brink
The Age of Abundance

“Nonideological moderation between the left and right’s opposing claims thus dwarfs the committed partisanship of either flank. Here is the rub of the matter: America is an exuberantly commercial and intensely competitive society, a fact of which true believers on the left sternly disapprove; it is, simultaneously and not unrelatedly , and an exuberantly secular and intensely hedonistic society, to the deep chagrin of true believers on the right. America is the way it is because the vast majority of Americans choose to make it that way, so it should come as no great shock that excessively vigorous condemnation of the contemporary American way of life meets with broad public disfavor. Ideologues, who define themselves by their dissent from America’s prevailing cultural synthesis must temper that dissent in their public pronouncements or else face marginalization.”
Lindsey, Brink
The Age of Abundance

“War and smack: I always hope for some kind of epiphany in each to lead me out but it never happens. You think you have hit the bottom many times then always find something else to lose, till after a while what once seemed like the bottom is an altitude that you are trying to scrabble back to. Even in my deepest moments of fear, retreating or withdrawing it’s all the same, when I see those flashes of hope and swear never again, promise I’ll keep away from the front or stay clean tonight, I know they are just illusions, flotsam in the river I pull myself up onto just so I can catch enough breath to last me for the next dive down.”
Loyd, Anthony
My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“When a photograph does capture ‘the moment’ in war, what ever it is, it leaves all the other mediums of reportage so far behind as to make them almost irrelevant: a single punch to the consciousness that will not go away until you close your eyes or look at something else.”
Loyd, Anthony
My War Gone By, I Miss It So

“Another hot debate I remember I was in had to do with the identity of Shakespeare. No color was involved there; I just got intrigued over the Shakespearean dilemma. The King James translation of the Bible is considered the greatest piece of literature in English. Its languae supposedly represents the ultimate in using the King’s English. Well, Shakespeare’s language and the Bible’s language are one and the same. They say that from 1604 to 1611, King James got a poet to translate to the Bible. Well if Shakespeare existed, he was then the top poet around. But Shakespeare is nowhere reported connected with the Bible. If had existed, why didn’t King James use him? And if he did use him, why is it one of the world’s best kept secrets?

I know that many say that Francis Bacon was Shakespeare. If that is true, why would Bacon have kept it secret? Bacon wasn’t royalty, when royalty sometimes used the nom de plume because it was “improper” for royalty to be artistic, or theatrical. What would Bacon have had to lose? Bacon, in fact, would have had everything to gain.

In the prison debates I argued for the theory that King James himself was the real poet who used the nom de plume of Shakespeare. King James was brilliant. He was the greatest king who ever sat on the British throne. Who else among royalty, on his time, would have had the giant talent to write Shakespeares works? It was he who practically “fixed” the Bible–which in itself and present King James version has enslaved the world.”
Malcolm X

“As the observance of religious rites is the foundation of a republic’s greatness, so disrespect for them is the source of its ruin.”
Machiavelli
Discourses II

“You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need.”
Palahniuk, Chuck
Fight Club

“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window – no, I don’t feel how small I am – but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”
Rand, Ayn
The Fountainhead

“If the melancholy history of revolution over the past half-century teaches us anything, it is the futility of a politics which concentrates itself single-mindedly on the overthrowing of governments, or ruling classes, or economic systems. This brand of politics finishes with merely redesigning the turrets and towers of the technocratic citadel. It is the foundations of the edifice that must be sought.”
Roszak, Theodore

“By 1799, the Dutch EIC had begun to lose money and dissolved during the crisis of the Napoleonic Wars. The English EIC lasted longer, but in the 1830s the British government broke its monopoly on trade with India. The company became financially insolvent, but was kept in existence by the British crown to function as the government of India. The simple reason was that no one could quite agree on how to replace the firm’s rule. This compromise ended in 1857, when the firm equipped its army with new Enfield rifles. A rumor spread that the catridges were greased with beef fat — thus defiling any Hindu, and the company’s Indian regiments mutinied. 11,00 Europenas were massacred in the “Sepoy Mutiny.”"
Singer, P.W.
Corporate Warriors

“By 1799, the Dutch EIC had begun to lose money and dissolved during the crisis of the Napoleonic Wars. The English EIC lasted longer, but in the 1830s the British government broke its monopoly on trade with India. The company became financially insolvent, but was kept in existence by the British crown to function as the government of India. The simple reason was that no one could quite agree on how to replace the firm’s rule. This compromise ended in 1857, when the firm equipped its army with new Enfield rifles. A rumor spread that the cartridges were greased with beef fat — thus defiling any Hindu, and the company’s Indian regiments mutinied. 11,000 Europeans were massacred in the “Sepoy Mutiny.”"
Singer, P.W.
Corporate Warriors

“Mercenary’s serve no country, protect no family, nor fight for a greater force they believe in. They simply harbor a commitment to war as a professional way of life. Soldiers serve to prevent wars, mercenaries require wars.”
Singer, P.W.
Corporate Warriors

“Privatized Military Firms represent the next evolution in provision of military services by private actor, parallel to the development of the modern business organization.”
Singer, P.W.
Corporate Warriors

“Privatization and Globalization embrace the nation that comparative advantage and competition maximize efficiency and effectiveness. Some argue that the trend towards privatization is part of a more general societal fragmentation, resulting from the deterioration of communal connections, the move is better described as a normative shift in worldview.”
Singer, P.W.
Corporate Warriors

“War is a realm which military thinkers such as Carl von Clausewitz could only describe as a series of unique situations limited by numerous ambiguities.”
Singer, P.W.
Corporate Warriors

“The implications of the privatization of certain aspects of the military is alarming. Unlike a soldier, a contractor can decide to quit; this results in a general lack of control, and possibly the deaths of the real soldiers. There is no patriotic element with corporate soldiers.”
Singer, P.W.
Corporate Warriors

“War is a realm which military thinkers such as Carl von Clausewitz could only describe as a series of unique situations limited by numerous ambiguities.”
Singer, P.W.
Corporate Warriors

“Our present theories of global balancing, bandwagoning, coercive diplomacy, deterrence, offense-defense dominance, or war termination all assume that the state is the sole providers of organized violence in the international system.”"
Singer, P.W.
Corporate Warriors

“We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our hands. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is..”
Taleb, Nassim
The Black Swan

“Contrary to the opinion held by the great David Hume, and that of the British empiricist tradition, that belief arises from custom, as they assumed that we learn generalizations solely from experience and empirical observations, it was shown from studies of infant behavior that we came equipped with mental machinery that causes us to selectively generalize from experiences (i.e, to selectively acquire inductive learning in some domains but remain skeptical in others). By doing so, we are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors — which found its way into our biology.”
Taleb, Nassim
The Black Swan

“Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.”
Taleb, Nassim
The Black Swan

“One who cannot be victorious assumes a defensive posture; one who can be victorious attacks.”
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

“What the military esteems is seizing advantage; what is practices is change and deception. One who excels at employing the military responds precipitously, distantly, and darkly. No one knows from where he goes forth. When Sun and Wu employed them, they had no enemies under Heaven.”
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

“If they are angry, perturb them: be deferential to foster their arrogance. If they are rested, force them to exert themselves. If they are united, cause them to be separated. Attack where they are unprepared. Go forth where they will not expect it.”
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

“Thus the army values being victorious; it does not value prolonged warfare.”
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

“In general, commanding a large number is like commanding a few. It is a question of dividing up the numbers. Fighting with a large number is like fighting with a few. It is a question of configuration and designation.”
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

“Water configures its flow in accord with the terrain; the army controls its victory in accord with the enemy. Thus the army does not maintain any constant strategic configuration of power (shih), waters has no constant shape (hsing). One who is able to change and transform in accord with the enemy and wrest victory is termed spiritual.”
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

“The greatest barrier to communicate between myself and would-be organizers arises when I try to get across the concept that tactics are not the product of careful cold reason, that they do not follow a table of organization or plan of attack. Accident, unpredictable reactions to your own actions, necessity, and improvisation dictate the direction and nature of tactics. Then, analytical logic is required to appraise where you are, what you can do next, the risks and hopes that you can look forward to. It is this analysis that protects you from being a blind prisoner of the tactic and the accidents that accompany it. But I cannot over-emphasize that the tactic itself comes out of the free flow of action and reaction, and requires on the part of the organizer an easy acceptance of apparent disorganization.”
Alinksy, Saul
Rules for Radicals

“Of course, Corporate Man is a great deal more than a hunter: he can speak and write, he can compose music and poetry, he can learn and reason, he can experiment and invent with an ingenuity and adaptability that are unique in the animal world. But all these are additions to, not subtractions from the hunting primate. The hunting band is still there, and when we deal with the corporation, we are dealing with a very recent adaption of it.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“…by our evolutionary nature, we could not survive on our own, the group, in the end, only survived as a group. We made our kill together or we returned home empty-handed; we ate together, or we all went to bed hungry; we survived together, or we all died. The hunting band was dominated by the need to survive as a hunting band; it was composed exclusively of individuals who survived collectively or not at all. No one could hunt in that band who had a private meat supply to fall back on if they chase was too tiring, the ground to rough, or the risks too great. What held it together was the common objective, which meant survival for all if it was attained and extinction for all if it was not. No wonder production meetings do not work with performers who can succeed while the rest fail; or editorial meetings with writers who can improve their reputations with a brilliant article in a disastrous issue. No wonder the meeting of corporation executives was a failure when any individual executive could raise his personal standing by producing marvelous profits for his division while the corporation as a whole was declaring a loss. This meeting, like my departmental meeting, was in fact a threat to survival rather than an instrument of survival.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“Telling a man to stand in front of a machine and pull and release a handle ten times a minute is not setting him an objective, and tell ten men to do the same at ten machines in not setting them a group objective. But if you tell them to produce a certain result, a certain number of drilled parts or quantity of coal or cars loaded onto the ship, by the end of the day or week or month, then you are setting them an objective, and you leave it to them to work out how to achieve it. In H. Estes words, it is the “difference between getting a janitor to keep the floors clean, as contrasted with sweeping every half hour with a 20-in broom, 10 strokes to the minute.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“So far we have talked about the ten-group as a form of hunting organization some 15 million years old. But there is a much older that events can sometimes call up to reinforce it: the threat to survival. And in very many species of living creatures there is a standard response to certain kinds of threat: aggression. If a group, as opposed to an individual, is threatened, the response is group aggression which exerts a powerful binding force, and leaders for all recorded history have known and used this power of threat by finding an aggression focus to bind a large group: the aggression focus can be Catholics, Huguenots, Jesus, Communists, blacks, whites, the management, the workers, or what you will — if people will believe they are a threat to survival, that is usually sufficient.
That classic case, in every sense of the phrase, of the inventing of an aggression focus is Cassius’s speech to Brutus when he is enlisting him as one of the ten-group of conspirators to murder Caesar. He presents Caesar as the threat to everyone’s liberty — the man who wants to become kind and hold every other citizen in subjection, the object of fear and hatred — and does it with a sensitive skill that would have made him a masterly shop steward. But nearly all leaders of ten-groups, whether consciously or subconsciously, keep an aggression focus firmly in the group’s mind. Usually the aggression focus is harnessed to an abstract principle: not “the newspaper that is competing for our readers” but “the newspaper that is debasing the standards of honest journalism; not “the store that is trying to have our customers away” but “the store that deceives the public with cheap and flashy goods that fall to bits in a week; not “our rival manufacturers” but “the manufacturers who pay for their glamour gimmicks with the money they save on safety.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“The word leadership enshrines an old fashioned fallacy that if a man had character and authority, all the other qualities like intelligence and scientific knowledge, and marker flair were unimportant.” “No corporal ever looks like a sergeant until he’s got three stripes on his sleeve.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“The essential point is that leadership is not a quality at all. High status-dominance is an innate quality; skill and experience and the habit of leadership are acquired qualities; but leadership itself is a relative term. A man becomes a leader in relation to a specific group and a specific task: once he has evolved from his ten-group as its leader he can begin to learn the job, and he may go on doing it for the rest of his life, but the basis of his leadership is always that he is the evolved leader of his group. All too often the corporation gets itself into desperate trouble by not endorsing the evolved leader; it thinks it is choosing between one candidate and another, whereas in fact, it is choosing between order and disorder.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“The leaders of ten-groups can at any stage bring people into their groups from outside, but there are not leadership appointments though they may evolve into leaders later; the corporations leadership at every level will developed organically, so to speak, and the corporation only has to know what it is looking for and confirm it when it finds it. But although this may be a theoretical duel, you encounter a grave difficulty when you try and put it into practices as you rise higher the nature of the task changes radically, and the leaders evolved at the lowest level may be totally unable to cope as more and more importance attaches to understanding technical arguments, assessing financial projections, foreseeing market changes, and formulating long-term plans. Of course, there will be many highly qualified staff working on all this; but the leader must be able to understand them, to know how to use them , or check that he is getting the information he asked for, and to sense that something has been left out or misunderstood. At the same time, he has to be an evolved and proved leader whose authority is accepted and respected…there is very little in the tasks at the lowest level to ensure that the leaders who emerge there will be capable of the types of skill that will be needed later.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“Some corporations have turned their university intake into graduate foremen, giving them a year or two in a position very similar to that of an army lieutenant. But there i s another approach, which was Napoleon’s. At the end of a battle or a campaign, his question was “quels sont les braves? — who are our heroes? Those were the ones to be promoted; appraisal by results, the principle favored both by modern management theory and age-old natural selection. Napoleon, of course, encountered the same problem as the British army; there was no guarantee that les braves would read or write. So when they were named they would be sent to school until they had skills necessary for their new rank.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

On the hunter-camp concept: “As I write this, at then end of 1970, it is certainly the fundamental political argument in both Britain and the US. In Britain the conservatives have been returned to power on a national feeling that the camp has been favored that the expense of the hunters: too much national expenditure to subsidize health, homes, and schools, too much government restriction on, and interference with, the activities of industry, so let’s sweep away this massive parasitic structure of controls, taxes, commissions, and civil servants and give people the freedom and incentive to produce and export and make us all richer — let’s kick some of those boondogglers out of the camp so that the hunters can have a bigger share of the meat they bring back and go off tomorrow fitter and more eager than before. In the US, the feeling seems to be exactly the reverse: “we’ve” been so preoccupied with giving the hunters everything they want that the camp is dirty and smelly, fighting and bullying are breaking out all the time, we can’t drink the water because everyone is excreting into, so let’s divert at least some of the time andenrgy and manpower from bringin back more meat than we can eat to clearing the place up and stopping the fights and making the camp a better place to live in. We can think of ourselves as belonging to IBM, USA, Chicago, or Britain — but this is a national membership, we belong in our minds. If I leave Chicago I cannot pretend that I provide for 10 million Chicagoans with conversation. A unit of five hundred or so is something you can feel apart of: not with the compelling bond of the ten-group, but nevertheless with a membership that cannot be shrugged off by a change of mind. You know that if you leave, everyone will notice the gap you have made — we belong not only by accepting but by being accepted.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“…far from being shameful or unnatural, the drive for status is one of the principle tools of evolution and natural selection not only in man but in a wide range of other species, and in particular those species which go around in groups; indeed, it is a question whether there is any animal society that does not have a status-hierarchy.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) have been kept in laboratories since sometime between 1840 and 1850. The modern laboratory rat belongs to a well-defined variety that differs from its wild progenitor in many ways. The laboratory rat is entirely dependent on the protected state of the laboratory where food, water, mate and shelter are provided, and the struggle for survival no longer exists. Among other differences, laboratory rats have smaller adrenal glands and less resistance to stress, fatigue, and disease than wild rats.
Thryoid glands have also become less active in laboratory rats, while, on the contrary, sex glands develop earlier and permit a greater fertility. They have smaller brains and are tamer and tractable than the active and aggressive wild rats. The genetic changes which occurred in the laboratory would, undeniably make them unable to compete successfully with wild rats in the environment in which the latter normally live.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“For the corporate tribe, and above all for the dispersed tribe, the full assembly is a unique and irreplaceable instrument of communication. It enables the leader to sense the true collective feeling with a certainty that is beyond flattery or politeness or misrepresentation. It enables the whole tribe to decide if the leader is leading them in the right way, and to warn or encourage him collectively without risking personal careers or reputations. Above all, it enables the tribe to make a collective discovery of its identity or what it stands for and what it stands against, what it believes in and is proud of, what it rejects and despises. There is a deep need to know this tribal feeling. With the decline of large political meeting, which told us very well, has come the rise of the opinion poll, the decline of other larger gatherings has generated top-ten lists for records, books; films, and television programs. All of these attempt to remedy the loss of this ancient method of reflection the collective tribal reaction, but none of them provides the sensitive living interaction between all the assembled individuals which gives such power and truth to the instantaneous response of an audience.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“Everyone knows that their field of operations is a battlefield. In corporate terms, any company under the size of a kingdom is a fighting unit. Empires, however, are another matter. They are so large and well-established that a fight to the death is out of the question. It is not merely that it would be a long, costly, and vicious battle: it is that the rival empires need each other. The great empires of oil, or heavy electricity or automobiles or steel do not want to conquer all their enemies — the dangers and worries of total monopoly would be a better reward for devastating conflict, and the conflict would be very nasty. A frightened empire is an ugly enemy, as Ralph Nader discovered. The result is, of course, an exact parallel to Professor Wynne-Edward’s discovery referred to in Chapter X: conventional competition. A price war in the oil or automobile industries would mean ever-diminishing revenues for ever-increasing effort, as would competitive auction of royalty offers to the Middle East sheikdoms: the classic over-fishing situation. The Oxford ethologist Professor NikoTindergen has filmed herring gulls doing exactly the same thing when defending the frontiers of their nesting territory they confront each other with fury, beaks wide open; but they do not attack each other — they furiously pull up clumps of grass. It is called “displacement activity” and is a form of ritualized aggression. There is much ritualized aggression between empires — in packaging, styling, quality of service, free offers, press and television advertising — and the tribesmen on the frontiers are kept on their toes; but a fight to the death would upset the delicate ecology of the industry and never happens.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man

“Until 1945, war was the dominant political issue…as the immediate threat of war receded, so governments turned more and more of their attention to employment and prosperity, and, of course, the Western governments encountered a problem; they could not command corporations in the way they could command fleets and armies. They could manipulate the knobs on the Keynesian dial, but these were insensitive and unspecific: the point of balance between “inflation and balance of payment crisis” and “squeeze and unemployment crisis” was dangerously elusive. Government’s province is the distribution of wealth, not its creation.”
Antony, Jay
Corporation Man