Greed Quotes

There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat.These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grow up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's a Rolex brigade. (This isn't to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives are selfish, but that these are ways of life that provide opportunities of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me.)There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: You will do as I say or I will hurt you.. . . Let me draw you a Venn diagram with two circles on it, denoting sets of individuals. They overlap: the greedy ones and the authoritarian ones. Let's shade in the intersecting area in a different color and label it: dangerous. Greed isn't automatically dangerous on its won, and petty authoritarians aren't usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity -- but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers.

~ Charles Stross

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others

~ Iain Banks

On Wall Street, Clarence was a diamond in a sea of glass, never greedy, never an ambulance-chaser, never the kind of person who deserved to die in the way that he did.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

And we remember that there must be a balance. No birth without death. No life without tears. What is taken from the world must be given back, and from him who takes and does not give back, who would tip the balance of the river, from him all will be taken. No one should live forever, but should give his blood to the river when the time comes so that tomorrow another may live. And so it goes.

~ Jessica Khoury

When greed transcends rationale, morality becomes irrelevant.

~ Duop Chak Wuol

It is greed that makes us human as it could be for good or bad.

~ Zaman Ali

We need to take things personally. We need to stop putting profits above people. We need to stop putting greed above need. We need to stop putting the rule of gold above the golden rule. We need to treat people as people and not as problems.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Until a few months ago we had a code of honor, and even the worst ruffians behaved with decency. You could leave your gold in a tent with no guard and no one would touch it, but now all that has changed. The law of the jungle rules, the only ideology is greed. Don't let yourself be parted from your weapons, and always travel in pairs or groups, because this is a land of thieves.

~ Isabel Allende

Some false representations contravene the law; some do not. The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business, and, besides, could not be done. The line between honesty and dishonesty is a narrow, shifting one and usually lets those get by that are the most subtle and already have more than they can use.

~ Clarence Darrow

It’s time to step back and reexamine our hatred and let wrath subside. Are we striking out against the real problems: ignorance, fear, want, greed, and political disenfranchisement or just trying to find the most immediate scapegoat on which to lay the blame? Are we so busy blaming our fellow Hobbits that we’ve forgotten who is really behind the fouling of our Shire? Are we personally guilty of greed? Most of us are, to an extent. We need to reexamine our own desires, and make sure they are really needs instead of just wants. Poverty could be wiped out world wide, if enough modern Hobbits just said, “No! We will not stand for it anymore,” or if those at the top of the economic ladder really wanted to do so.

~ Steve Bivans

People's behaviors are messages, not a diagnosis because I can no longer discern the world's version of insanity.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Greed:Your own lies make you sick.

~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Greed is taking more than you need to feed. Avarice is hoarding, and stockpiling stolen, rotten goods.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

There is only one right way to eat a steak - with greed in your heart and a smile on your face.

~ Soumeet Lanka

My Oneness will stop the machine that overtakes people's minds. Do we really need new clothes, or new cars, or new TVs? Should we really ingest food made from chemicals not of this earth? Should we really give our money to people who don't need it but want it to fill the evil greed inside of their body? No, we don't, but people need me to show them how to be free. Jimmy, The One

~ Teresa Lo

A lot of businesses would rather make an extra dollar than to save a soul. If greed isn't evil, what else would we call it?

~ Hafiz

There is no such thing as senility when it comes to envy, greed laziness, wrath and pride. It's her destructive character from childhood. ~ Angelica Hopes, If I Could Tell You

~ Angelica Hopes

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

~ Matt Taibbi

To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. you must change man, not systems. Can you and our vapouring friends of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, or any other learned society of France, devise a system of government that has never yet been tried? Surely not. And can we say of any system tried that it proved other than failure in the end? My dear Philippe, the future is to be read with certainty only in the past. Ad actu ad posse valet consecutio. Man never changes. He is always greedy, always acquisitive, always vile. I am speaking of Man in the bulk.

~ Rafael Sabatini

Capitalism is a social system where the health and security of a nation are compromised for corporate gain.

~ Suzy Kassem

When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.

~ Alexander Hamilton

Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of “greed” is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned—never to those wanting to take other people’s money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government.

~ Thomas Sowell

The whole idea of government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

~ P.j. O'rourke

I cannot live to hear the news from England.But I do prophesy th' election lightsOn Fortinbras; he has my dying voice.So tell him, with th' occurents, more and less,Which have solicited - the rest is silence.

~ William Shakespeare

All along, I was less concerned about walking a path of integrity and more caught up in a compass calibrated by greed. And with a compass such as this, how is it that I’m having a hard time understanding why I am where I am?

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To make a choice not to sacrifice is to decide that I am better off allowing a life to perish than release the resources I possess that might allow it to thrive. And because of choices such as these, the life that I am really allowing to perish is mine.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

With every rise in choices, the expectations double up which puts people deeper down into the rubble.

~ Ashish Patel

You ever get the feeling the world's filling up with bastards? I do. What I want to know is what happens when all the bastards run out of people to crap on? What happens when all that's left in the world is bastards? . . . The golden rule. Screw unto others before they screw unto you.

~ William Hoffman

And there can be no end to greed because man, by his very exclusive human nature, is pathologically insatiable.

~ Mariano Ngan

It is strange people should be so greedy when they are alone in the world!

~ Emily Brontë

It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

The Utopians wonder how any man should be so much taken with the glaring doubtful lustre of a jewel or a stone, that can look up to a star or to the sun himself; or how any should value himself because his cloth is made of a finer thread: for how fine soever that thread may be, it was once no better than the fleece of a sheep, and that sheep was a sheep still for all its wearing it.

~ Thomas More

Humankind has not learned about balance, let alone practiced it. It is guided by greed and ambition, steered by fear. In this way it will eventually destroy itself. But nature will survive; at least the plants will.

~ Brian L. Weiss

The amount of gold someone has is never the issue, but rather the love of it and the want of more for personal gain that consumes the hearts of many good people.

~ A.j. Darkholme

We may see the small Value God has for Riches, by the People he gives the

~ Alexander Pope

We cherish reprobates, not for their cruelty, but for their little show of patronage.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Capitalism is a social system owned by the capitalistic class, a small network of very wealthy and powerful businessmen, who compromise the health and security of the general population for corporate gain.

~ Suzy Kassem

Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed. Simply put, it lacks values, and such a system will eventually collapse once its true light is discovered by the masses. Though some say that capitalism is a modern system, corruption has been the source for the demise of every great civilization.

~ Suzy Kassem

The best is the enemy of good.

~ Voltaire