"Emotions have no place in business, unless you do business with them"
About this Quote
A nice, cold slap to the cult of corporate rationality, delivered with a grin you can almost hear. Duerrenmatt’s line needles the managerial fantasy that “business” is a clean room where feelings are contaminants. His twist - “unless you do business with them” - flips the premise: emotions aren’t the opposite of commerce; they’re one of its most reliable products.
The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s a practical jab at hypocrisy: companies preach objectivity while selling reassurance, belonging, prestige, desire, safety. On another, it’s a moral warning about denial. If you pretend emotion has “no place,” you don’t eliminate it; you just drive it underground, where it shows up as ego in leadership, panic in markets, cruelty in downsizing, tribalism in office politics. Duerrenmatt’s cynicism is that the supposedly sober machinery of capitalism is powered by the very forces it disavows.
Context matters: a Swiss playwright and novelist shaped by postwar Europe, Duerrenmatt made a career out of exposing the respectable surfaces that hide darker motivations. His worlds are orderly on paper, absurd in practice. This quote fits that signature: the tone of a rule, punctured by the punchline that reveals the rule was always a performance.
It works because it’s compact and transactional itself: a clean binary (“no place”) followed by the loophole that swallows the rule. In 12 words, it indicts both corporate puritanism and the emotional economy that keeps the lights on.
The intent is double-edged. On one level, it’s a practical jab at hypocrisy: companies preach objectivity while selling reassurance, belonging, prestige, desire, safety. On another, it’s a moral warning about denial. If you pretend emotion has “no place,” you don’t eliminate it; you just drive it underground, where it shows up as ego in leadership, panic in markets, cruelty in downsizing, tribalism in office politics. Duerrenmatt’s cynicism is that the supposedly sober machinery of capitalism is powered by the very forces it disavows.
Context matters: a Swiss playwright and novelist shaped by postwar Europe, Duerrenmatt made a career out of exposing the respectable surfaces that hide darker motivations. His worlds are orderly on paper, absurd in practice. This quote fits that signature: the tone of a rule, punctured by the punchline that reveals the rule was always a performance.
It works because it’s compact and transactional itself: a clean binary (“no place”) followed by the loophole that swallows the rule. In 12 words, it indicts both corporate puritanism and the emotional economy that keeps the lights on.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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