Christopher Ketcham: The human form can only grow so big. The United States, it would seem, is suffering its own kind of island gigantism. Bigness worship permeates every layer of the culture; it is racked into our brains with every turn of the advertising screw; it is a totalizing force.
Paul Graham: It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.
Ketcham: Look at IBM, where a senior vice-president once described the managerial hierarchy as "a giant pool of peanut butter we have to swim through."
John Bird: They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.
J.B.S. Haldane: For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form.
Umberto Eco: What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees.
Ketcham: Today we find ourselves in an unprecedented age of corporate gigantism. This situation is characterized not by the outright monopolies that worried Brandeis, but by the rise of oligopolies.
Decius, 2010: The thing that sucks about freedom of speech is that rich people can afford more speech than you can.
Simon Johnson: Recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore. More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.
An exchange: Gas Station Proprietor: Look, I need to know what I stand to win.
Anton Chigurh: Everything.
Gas Station Proprietor: How's that?
Anton Chigurh: You stand to win everything.
Ketcham: Creativity, in any case -- the radical's creativity, which is the only kind -- is not what the corporation looks for. Rather, it pursues what William Whyte called "the fight against genius." It looks for Whyte's "Organization Man," who seeks protection, safety, succor in bigness, who can be relied on to conform and submit. What it lacks in creativity, of course, the big corporation makes up for in coercion.
Richard Sennett: From an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."
The Curse of Bigness | 
