Today’s consumers are eager to become loyal fans of companies that respect purposeful capitalism. They are not opposed to companies making a profit; indeed, they may even be investors in these companies – but at the core, they want more empathic, enlightened corporations that seek a balance between profit and purpose. Simon Mainwaring
If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right. Woody Allen
From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the US economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing. Noam Chomsky
The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable. Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times, 1829
We must develop an absolute priority of humans ahead of profit – any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive ... Together. Frank Herbert, Introduction to New World or No World, 1970
Who profits by a sin has done the sin. Seneca
But profits as big as this – £13.1 billion – still throw up all sorts of questions. Are oil companies making too much? Should they pay even more tax? (Oil & Profit) News report, cited Crude Britannia: The Story of North Sea Oil 3/3, BBC 2009
Of course it’s madness to have vast profits from oil on the one hand, and starving people who can’t afford food, let alone oil, on the other. But that’s capitalism. That’s the ‘right’ of people to do what they like with their own property. And of course the people who are making those surpluses (and it includes shareholders in oil companies as well as the sheikhs and their hangers-on in Arabia) want their ill-gotten gains to ‘grow’ just as fast as possible. So the ‘surpluses’ chase themselves round the world money markets looking for the highest interest rates, and the world’s poor people have to pay yet again in higher prices to keep the ‘surpluses’ growing.
As long as the people of the world pay service to the claimed ‘right’ of the propertied few to use their profits as they wish, the ‘recycling of oil surpluses’ to benefit the world’s poor stands not a snowball’s chance in hell. Paul Foot, Three Letters to a Bennite, 1981
There would be no wealth at all if no one worked. Labour is essential to everything that is produced. The rich have got rich because they have swiped a proportion of the value of the workers’ labour, and because they use that surplus for one purpose only: to increase their own wealth, power and privilege.
This exploitation of labour, by a class of people who have grown rich because of it, is as central a characteristic of society today as it ever was. The ‘market’ is the economic mechanism by which this system works. It claims to be able to identify what is wanted or needed, and then to produce it. It claims an ‘economic discipline’ which only produces where a profit can be made. If something makes a profit, it is selling and therefore it is needed. If it doesn’t make a profit, it isn’t needed or wanted and therefore shouldn’t be made. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism ch4
We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. T S Eliot
The men in Washington should be at the forefront of technology, the forefront of human study, the forefront of crime, all factors that shape human behaviour ... And we have the resources today. To house everyone. Build hospitals all over the world. Build schools all over the world. The finest equipment in labs for teaching and doing medical research. So, you see, we have all that. But we’re in a monetary system. And in a monetary system there is profit. Jacque Fresco, founder & director Venus Project
War, poverty, corruption, hunger, misery, human suffering will not change in a monetary system. Jacque Fresco
Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick: together they have driven Carnegie Steel to massive profits. The Men Who Built America IV: Blood is Spilt, History 2012
The Cali mafia’s annual profits were estimated at between $4 and $8 billion a year, and the organisation operated like a well-run multinational business. Misha Glenny, McMafia
The Government in Beijing completes the virtuous circle of profit by placing all manner of tax and financial incentives for overseas Chinese to invest back in the mainland. ibid.
The question, what personal advantage would he gain, never once occurred to Owen. He simply wanted to do the work; and he was so fully occupied with thinking and planning how it was to be done that the question of profit was crowded out. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
‘It hasn’t always been like it, and it won’t always be like it,’ said Owen. ‘The time will come, and it’s not very far distant, when the necessaries of life will be produced for use and not for profit. The time is coming when it will no longer be possible for a few selfish people to condemn thousands of men and women and little children to live in misery and die of want.’ ibid.
The machinery became the property of a comparatively few individuals and private companies, who use it not for the benefit of the community but to create profits for themselves. ibid.
The hundreds of thousands of pounds that are yearly wasted in well-meant but useless charity accomplish no lasting good, because while charity soothes the symptoms it ignores the disease, which is, the private ownership of the means of producing the necessaries of life, and the restriction of production, by a few selfish individuals for their own profit. ibid.
Holmes: That doesn’t concern me overly. I shall make greater profit in this affair than all my other ventures put together. Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon 1942 starring Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce & Lionel Atwill & Kaaren Verne & William Post junior & Dennis Hoey & Holmes Herbert & Mary Gordon & Henry Victor et al, director Roy William Neill
Mother to child: Under fundamentalist neoliberal free market capitalism, corporations are encouraged to maximize profits because the economy is considered the most important aspect of society. It doesn’t really matter that profit comes at a very significant cost to humans, animals and the planet, because rich people say so. Mematic online Tweet March 2023
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our successes. The fertile Earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And the children dying of (hunger) must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must rot (if not sold at a profit) … and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath