Greed Quotes

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.

~ John Maynard Keynes

Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist, and you will sweep war from the earth.

~ Henry Ford

Just as sex is a God-given instinct for the prolongation of the human race, so the desire for property as a prolongation of one's ego is a natural right sanctioned by natural law. A person is free on the inside because he can call his soul his own; he is free on the outside because he can call property his own. Internal freedom is based upon the fact that I am; external freedom is based on the fact that I have. But just as the excesses of flesh produce lust, for lust is sex in the wrong place, so there can be a deordination of the desire for property until it becomes greed, avarice, and capitalistic aggression.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

Socialism is politicized envy.

~ Rousas John Rushdoony

Which is worse? Lust for the purchasing power of money, or the kind of lust that covets power over others? Let the history of 20th Century socialist revolutions answer that question.

~ A.e. Samaan

They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master—I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov—my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That's for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood.

~ Maxim Gorky

Greed runs in all men...

~ Angelo Tsanatelis

Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: People must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.

~ Margaret Atwood

The real problem is I'm greedy. I want complete, utter, unceasing bliss. But I don't want to fall into it either. If happiness were money I wouldn't want to win the lottery. I want to accomplish it, urn it as John Houseman would say. I want it to be an achievement because I want to be in control of my life. I don't want things to happen to me, I want them to happen because of me. Power I want. I want to feel the way I do when I stretch a new canvas and I want to feel that way all the time. the blank canvas fills me with the power of imminent creation. I'm its god an it always bends to my will and when I'm done I know, inside, that it's markedly better than what almost all of my similarly-engaged others can achieve. That's happiness.

~ Sergio De La Pava

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

...an' there never yet was speculation but in the long run, it meant smash. Ye run so hard that ye fall ower yoursel

~ Neil M. Gunn

Civilization on Earth planet was equated with selfishness and greed; those people who lived in a civilized state exploited those who did not. There were shortages of vital commodities on Earth planet, and the people in the civilized nations were able to monopolize those commodities by reason of their greater economic strength. This imbalance appeared to be at the root of thedisputes.

~ Cristopher Priest

There are sufficient resources in the world for the needs of everybody, but not enough for the greed of even a significant minority.

~ Millard Fuller

Does your guilty past catch up so fast with your age? You've been robbing hex nuts, cap nuts, lock nuts and wing nuts. No wonder you have turned into a greedy nut. ~ Angelica Hopes, If I Could Tell You

~ Angelica Hopes

Loan sharking may mean investment and immediate solutions but desperate loan sharks, who are short of cash, abuse your rights and attack other people's home. ~ Odyssey of a Heart, Home of a Soul

~ Angelica Hopes

Terrible times breed terrible things, my lord.

~ George R.r. Martin

The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight. No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, fleeing at velocities that approach the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the Terror of the Universe.

~ Edward Abbey

Ambition's ambition is immortality. To create an eternal legacy.

~ Renzo Dante (Saligiare)

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

~ Pat Conroy

Ambition is greed without makeup.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

~ George Monbiot

Greed is like a dark side of every man, and you could not see it from the appearance of a man, but in the inside the greedy beast already dominating you.

~ Steven Eric Chen

In some cases, people with a body (whose size) they did not long for are victims of having a bank balance (whose size) they longed for.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Things joined by profit, when pressed by misfortune and danger, will cast each other aside.

~ Zhuangzi

Greed is mistaken nobility. Instead of robbing all the pain and hardship from people's lives and rescuing them from danger, greed robs provisions from providers.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

These are the four that are never content: that have never been filled since the dew began-Jacala's mouth, and the glut of the kite, and the hands of the ape, and the eyes of Man.

~ Rudyard Kipling

Day and night - ruthlessly apply key lessons of mankind such as leaving greed, fear and lust to improve the efficiency & effectiveness of life.

~ V.v. Rao

This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.

~ Émile Zola

The single and peculiar mind is boundWith all the strength and armor of the mindTo keep itself from noyance, but much moreThat spirit upon whose weal depends and restsThe lives of many. The cess of majestyDies not alone, but like a gulf doth drawWhat's near it with it; or it is a massy wheelFixed on the summit of the highest mount,To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser thingsAre mortised and adjoined, which, when it falls,Each small annexment, petty consequence,Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never aloneDid the king sigh, but with a general groan.

~ William Shakespeare

The town is mobbed out with Saturday shoppers looking for Christmas bargains. You can almost breathe in the raw greed which hangs in the air like vapour. As the late afternoon darkness falls, the lights look tacky and sinister.

~ Irvine Welsh

How stand I, then,That have a father killed, a mother stained,Excitements of my reason and my blood,And let all sleep, while to my shame I seeThe imminent death of twenty thousand menThat for a fantasy and trick of fameGo to their graves like beds, fight for a plotWhereon the numbers cannot try the cause,Which is not tomb enough and continentTo hide the slain? O, from this time forthMy thoughts be bloody or be nothing

~ William Shakespeare

If they succeed, it will not matter if Man becomes immortal.He will have nothing to live for.

~ James Edwin Gunn

Hatred and greed are heavy loads. Your motive, on the other hand, is love. And instead of priding yourselves on your cunning, you recognize how weak you are...so weak that you must depend totally on the Spirit of God.

~ Brother Andrew

Always somewhere there is fire or smoke, insistent reminders of the greed consuming the world

~ Sy Montgomery

Too late for that now,” the Eldest Leprechaun said. “The damage is done. Give the thing a name, and it takes shape. They gave a name and a shape to the force that’s always hated us. It’s everything we’re not. It’s New Ireland, it’s money for money’s sake, brown paper envelopes stuffed full of bribes—the turn of mind that says that the old’s only good for theme parks, and the new is all there needs to be. It’s been getting stronger and stronger all this while.And now that it’s more important to the people living in the city than we are, it’s become physically real.

~ Andrew M. Greeley

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

~ Matt Taibbi

Corruption,' Jordan Belfort believes, 'is endemic to human being. I mean, even men in monasteries - where enticement is hard to come by – even men in those circumstances have sex with other men and abuse children. Look at the Catholic Church! Man is an imperfect animal and he is corruptible, okay? And in finance, the liquid nature of the market makes corruption very easy. On Wall Street, this liquidity is so in your face -' he suddenly grits his teeth - 'that if you have even the slightest predisposition to the dark side, you become corrupted. In addition to which, those attracted to Wall Street have a predisposition to greed.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

After sealing the door, Alqash went to the river to cleanse the blood from his hands and the dagger, and also to wash his hands of the faith that he had forfeited in exchange for short-lived riches.

~ Musharraf Ali Farooqi

The world says: You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more. This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky