It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business...There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that corporations have become more influential than traditional nations and ideologies in shaping the world.
Paddy Chayefsky's quote highlights the significant power that corporations wield in the modern world, suggesting that they have overtaken nations and ideologies as the primary forces that govern our lives. In this view, the traditional concepts of country and democracy have diminished in importance, with corporations like IBM and Exxon taking on roles akin to national identities, indicating a shift in the structure of global influence and governance.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a speech about the impact of corporate influence on democracy.
More from Paddy Chayefsky
All quotes →Television will do anything for a rating... anything!
Television is democracy at its ugliest.
We've established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived... and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing!
Similar quotes
They don't want equal time - they want all the time there is.
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as though a chink in the dark: light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice agin, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.
The empiric easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to pretend-to make claims for which there is no justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others-to "bluff."
We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic.
Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest.