Greed Quotes

[Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite.

There are six reasons anyone does anything: Love. Faith. Greed. Boredom. Fear..." he said, ticking them off on his fingers; but he lingered on the last, drawing a deep breath before he said, "Revenge.

A compass calibrated by my greed is a rather shrewd way to legitimize my agenda. However, true north on a compass such as this is a straight line to the edge of a really big cliff.

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

The cycle of optimism and euphoria leading to greed, fear and capitulation, giving way to hope and building back to optimism, drives the expansion and contraction of our financial world in a market cycle of collective human emotion.

...we have something they want. Valuing knowledge above all else results in a lust for power, and that leads men into dark and empty places. We should be thankful that we know better.

The greed of power drowns our ethics.

Anger-pride-deceit-greed; they are the ones giving you pain and only they are your enemies. There is no other enemy out there. There is only a nimit (evidentiary doer) outside. Wrong vision makes you accuse the nimit. When you attain the right belief (samkit), know that you have found the solution.

Money. The ultimate motivation. The ultimate way of keeping score.

Inside Duquet something like a tightly closed pine cone licked by fire opened abruptly and he exploded with incensed and uncontrollable fury, a life’s pent-up rage. ‘No one helped me,’ he shrieked, ‘I did everything myself. I endured. I contended with powerful men. I suffered in the wilderness. I accepted the risk I might die. No one helped me!’ The boy’s gaze shifted, the fever-boiled eyes following Duquet’s rising arm closing only when the tomahawk split his brain.

Sex and commerce are fine things, but man cannot live by Viagra and the Dow Jones alone. A life led collecting things and experiences in pursuit of happiness is not necessarily a bad life, but it’s not a good life either. Too often, the Democrats act like the Party of Lust, and the Republicans the Party of Greed. Both are deadly sins that eat at the soul.

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

Ambition strives. At first for goals, until it reaches them. Then for more, because it's insatiable.

I am thankful that I can be thankful, for if thankfulness did not exist my heart would be irretrievably imprisoned by the crazed twins of acquisition and possession, and my soul would exist as a forever slave to greed.

The events of the Titanic disaster can be seen as a symbol of what happens through overconfidence in technology, complacence, and a mindset of profits over people's safety.

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.

Ask yourself something. Have you ever thought about why guys want you gone the next day? It’s not because they’ve got things to do, though I’m sure there are a few assholes who think like that, either because they repeated the folly so often they learned to bury the guilt or because they didn’t have a conscience to begin with but, truthfully, it’s because they can’t stand to look at the reason they feel a hole in their chest. They don’t like reminders of who helped put that sick feeling in the pits of their stomachs. As long as they had a decent mama, the guilt is always substantial. Always. If they say differently, they’re liars." - Spencer Blackwell, GREED

I liked his attention. But I also felt like there was something sick and wrong about it. Like it might make me sick later. I thought of my grandmother, my father's mother. How when I used to visit her in Georgia she would always let me eat all the cookies and frozen egg rolls I wanted. "Go ahead, sweetheart, there's more," she would say. And it seemed okay because she was a grown-up, and I wanted all the Chips Ahoy! cookies in the bag. But I always ended up feeling extremely sick afterward. I looked at Bookman, his eyes swollen with emotion.

Our prayers are something akin to delivering a list, verses surrendering a life. The former will always leave me creating the next list, while the latter will leave me creating a new life.

People are dying of starvation and famine.And you have a MASSERATTI!

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.

Too often there is this sinister greed that pulls at my coattails, subtly whispering in the ear of my soul that it is within my rights to tuck away a few dark trinkets to toy with when the tedium of righteous living gets a bit boring. But God would suggest that I empty my pockets.

You see Carter, people are two things: greedy and cruel. So we have a perfect set-up here. The greed part - a kid pays a buck for a chance to win a hundred. Plus fifty boxes of chocolates. The cruel part - watching two guys hitting each other, maybe hurting each other, while they're safe in the bleachers. That's why it works, Carter, because we're all bastards.

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.

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.

Human nature defeats me sometimes, how greed and spite can lurk so divisively around the utmost courage and sacrifice.

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.

Because thankfulness is the tonic that always cures the cancers of greed, envy and jealously, it should be taken in liberal doses daily.

As a result of this greed for power, the poor is not only silenced but also oppressed.

George Arthur, a tribal council delegate, spoke on behalf of the tribe. Arthur was a chairman, too, of the Navajo legislature's resources committee. . . ."Uranium mining and milling on and near the reservation has been a disaster for the Navajo people. The Department of the Interior has been in the pocket of the uranium industry, favoring its interest and breaching its trust duties to the Navajo mineral owners. We are still undergoing what appears to be a never-ending federal experiment to see how much devastation can be endured by a people and a society from exposure to radiation in the air, in the water, in mines and on the surface of the land. We are unwilling to be the subjects of that ongoing experiment any longer.

The birthplace of anarchy is the cemetery of freedom.

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

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

Sometimes in life, as in literature, people get their just desserts. The greedy man loses everything because he cannot resist seeking more riches.

All right people, listen up! If you've got a family back home waiting for you or if you just want to save your own skin, turn around and walk away. Also, women! I have no intention of fighting any women!

The Master said, “The gentleman understands what is right, whereas the petty man understands profit.”(Analects 4.16)

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.

Terrible times breed terrible things, my lord.

Life is not a matter of dollars and cents, houses and lands, earning capacity and financial achievement. Greed must not be allowed to make man the slave of wealth.

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

Selfish needs, wants, and desires needed to be obliterated. Greed, overindulgence, and gluttony had to be expunged from human behavior. The solution was in self-control, in minimalism, in sparse living conditions; one simple and a brand-new dictionary filled with words everyone would understand.

War, money and greed that is the modern heinous Trinity, and they are inseparable these days.

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.

There are people who are never content, never appeased, forever dissatisfied—who continually look to what escapes them, convincing themselves that if only they could attain that one desire outside of reach they would be happy.  It seems almost pointless to give to these people because their eyes immediately shift from the gift to stare miserably at the portion held back.  Their wants, demands, expectations, appetites are never satiated, thus they refuse to be happy.  And you cannot make them so.

Complacency delivered us into the hands of evil greedy men like Cheney.

Greed is an unreasonable or all-absorbing desire to acquire things or wealth. One test of greed is that it is never satisfied. Greed is repeatedly condemned in the Bible.

A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.

Being a human is a great power. One can obtain everything. However, it is the greed that harasses him.

Are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?

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?

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

For greed all nature is too little.

We go from one war to another; we go from one terrorist group to another and we go from one calamity to another, but there is a pattern there if you know where to look.It's amazing how one when one war is about to end, another miraculously pops its head up.Coincidence? Hmmm...I'm highly skeptical.However, a lot of money seems to go into these 'wars' and there always seems to be little change left at the end of it.Like I said in my other quote..."War! Someone's making a hell of a lot of money!

The world is on fire with hate- everyone is blaming one another saying that religion is responsible for it!In all honesty, hate has no fate. But greed does it needs money, its faith.

When Greed makes to money number one priority, it trust nobody

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.

Brad Green, almost overnight, became the poster boy for the common Wall Street tale - proving once again that greed, most definitely, kills. Giving away about 99% of his fortune was also front page news, but Green barely blinked at having to scrape by with only $200 million. The government seized all five of his homes, his three boats, two jets, a helicopter, 14 cars, and all of his assets except the $200 million he stashed for a rainy day in an offshore bank account.

Whenever success and fame override our senses with greed, arrogance and delusion; it is a time to pause and reflect.

Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.

We were too greedy, grasping for immortality too soon. Perhaps if we had only been patient, content to wait, we would all have forever in the end.