Greed Quotes

Indifference and greed has taken control of our lives. If a decision or mandate doesn't affect us we do not care, we do not think of the many who will suffer the consequences... Many will soon be without healthcare coverage and the healthy people do not care. The government says it will be replace with DGS... and it is true... Death Got Served.

~ Maria Nieves

Just as it is hard for us, in our garden, to stop weeding, because there is always another weed there in front of us, it may be hard for her to stop grazing, because there are always a few more shoots of fresh grass just ahead of her.

~ Lydia Davis

Blood diamonds, she thought. That’s exactly what these are. She felt almost as superstitious as the Africans now, as if the pink diamonds themselves had somehow caused all this hardship and death.

~ Mike Wells

We had no compunction toward our enemies [the ants] and took to increasingly desperate and violent means of dealing with them. If we noticed they'd laid siege to a snack, we might trap them in a circle drawn with water and take away whatever they were eating, then watch them scurry about in confusion before wiping them off the floor with a wet cloth. I took pleasure in seeing them shrivel into black points when burning coals were rolled over them. When they attacked an unwashed pan or cup they'd soon be mercilessly drowned. I suppose initially each of us did these things only when we were alone, but in time, we began to be openly cruel. We came around to Amma's view of them as demons come to swallow our home and became a family that took pleasure in their destruction. We might have changed houses since, but habits are harder to change.

~ Vivek Shanbhag

When you stopped to think about it, he reflected, there weren't many things in life one truly needed. To want too much was worse than greed: it was stupidity - a waste of precious time and effort.

~ Tad Williams

But you can’t give them everything they want—they will always want more than they have.

~ Marie Lu

Ah, Caderousse,' said Andrea, 'how covetous you are! Two months ago you were dying with hunger.''The appetite grows by what it feeds on,' said Caderousse.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.

~ Lillian Hellman

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

~ Erich Fromm

… human needs are finite, but human greed is not …

~ Fritjof Capra

They listen to the music of idiots and amuse themselves with the sordid miseries of their businesses. They are not the things of angels or of any higher outpost that humanity might aspire to. Your loathsome vomitous businessman king is of the lowest order, his advisors crumbling mockeries of education driven by avarice. My love, dress them in the suits of mockery, and in their advanced state of stupidity and senility, burn and destroy them, so their ashes might join the compost which they so much deserve.

~ Lou Reed

Greed is a suit that’s tailor made: it finds a way to fit every lifestyle, no matter how much or how little you earn.

~ Casey N. Cep

Greed is not a consequence of poverty. If it were so, why does the art of acquisition continue to hone and whet itself towards ever more sophisticated strategies? Why is there no end to personal betrayal, corporate espionage, and diplomatic deception among nations? In accolade to greed, even semantics and rationalization have graduated to such undreamed-of heights! History, in failing to embrace the truth, always genuflects to the orchestral swings and sways of contemporary power.

~ Mariano Ngan

Blessed are the mendacious, for they shall grow wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.

~ James K. Morrow

In choosing to exchange precious principles for worthless impulses, I have far too often bankrupted my soul in order to bankroll my ego.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I couldn't see much, but it somehow seemed brighter across the wall, as if the sun gave more of it's light to the west. Maybe the people there were more selfish, I thought. Because we needed that sunlight far more than they did.

~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

Desire is insatiable as death, but He who fills all in all can fill it. The capacity of our wishes who can measure? But the immeasurable wealth of God can more than overflow it.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Hoarding is both unnecessary and an affront to God, who is perfectly capable of providing abundantly for those who trust in him.

~ Richard B. Hays

Beware of those who are always hungry, for they will feed you to the wolves just to get paid.

~ Suzy Kassem

With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We recklessly attempt to disguise our ‘greed’ by dressing it in the garb of other nobler ideals such as ‘rights’ and ‘privileges.’ Yet, if we dare dress ‘greed’ in an authentic sense of thankfulness, greed will suffocate within the folds of that very clothing.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

...we steal with our eyes closed to the conditions in which the poor, who make our affluence possible, live. We covet what our neighbours have and want more of the same.

~ Karen Baker-Fletcher

There never were greed and cunning in the world yet, that did not do too much, and overreach themselves. It is as certain as death.

~ Charles Dickens

Oral Roberts is a greed-crazed white-trash lunatic who should have been hung upside down from a telephone pole on the outskirts of Tulsa 44 years ago, before he somehow transmogrified into the money-sucking animal that he became when he discovered television.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.

~ John Steinbeck

Here is a greedy man who keeps to himselfThe beautiful pears ripe in his garden.

~ Bashō Matsuo

Whenever one feels like saying “the money that billionaire spent on his fleet of yachts could have been used better by the public sector”“, one should ask oneself when was the last time one heard of a billionaire buying an army of tanks and a set of nuclear weapons.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

A foolish environmentalist wants to save nature from the greed of the market by exposing it to the tragedy of the commons. A smart environmentalist wants to save nature from the tragedy of the commons by exposing it to the greed of the market.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

History repeats.

~ Pippa Dacosta

When we are rich and famous and powerful, we do not want to die. On the other hand, if we are miserable and suffering, we want to die and leave it all. But can joy or misery last forever? There is a saying, All celebrations must end sometime. Any wish to live forever or die immediately is often a whim of the moment. How do we know that, although we are happy now, we may not be sad the next day, or sad now but may be happy soon? Given that good and ill, fortune and misfortune come in their own way, we should not cling to life or embrace death. Life and death will come of their own. Why be greedy about life and afraid of death?

~ Liezi

They were nothing more than modern day pagan worshippers. Congregants of a religion built on greed and hedonism. The trading floor served as their shrine, the phones as their Holy Grail, and the clients as the prophets who would entitle them to choose between putting the next down payment on a Lamborghini or a Mercedes

~ Soroosh Shahrivar

Why can't we say 'When!' about money the way we say 'When!' about coffee?

~ Lionel Fisher

Recently I keep thinking that this isn’t about the survival of a species. It’s about why we’re never satisfied with what we need, why we always take a bit more.

~ Wu Ming-Yi

Superficial efficiency seems cheaper at first, but it costs more the long run, with the cost being pushed off onto someone other than the one who saves a few bucks.

~ Matt Perman

This wasn't a person, Zuzana thought, this was greed wearing skin.

~ Laini Taylor

The easiest way to combat greed is by recognizing the value of contentment and simplicity.

~ Donald L. Hicks

Some people take what they need from the orchard, and other people pick the orchard clean.From - The Mind Game Company - The Players

~ Andrew Neff

I am chaos eternal. I desire everything this world and the next offers. I am greed, I am hunger. Oh how I hunger... I want the pathetic mortals of this world to bow before me. I want all that they own, all they desire, every marvelous creation of theirs, but there is only one thing in this world that I need, and that, Muse, is you.

~ Pippa Dacosta

Your actions are catalysts to another’s actions. One could last a second, another could last to the end of mankind. Share kindness, plant the seed, help humanity overcome their greed.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

I too often allow people to become a sterile commodity to be bartered in the service of my greed, and in doing something so absurdly reckless I foolishly barter away everything that meets my need.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough