Greed Quotes - Page 9

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.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States.

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

When your child is a little older, you can teach him about our tax system in a way that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When he has mowed it and asks to be paid, withhold $5 and explain that this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him that this is "fair". Also, explain that you need the other $4 yourself to cover the administrative costs of dividing the money. When he cries, tell him he is being "selfish" and "greedy". Later in life he will thank you.

In all honesty, I don’t envy you the possession of this power over memory, nor do I admire you. Because humans are usually completely unconcerned with the memories of other creatures. Human existence involves the willful destruction of the existential memories of other creatures and of your own memories as well. No life can survive without other lives, with the ecological memories of other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which the live. People don’t realize they need to rely on the memories of other organisms to survive. You think that flowers bloom in colorful profusion just to please your eyes. That a wild boar exists just to provide meat for your table. That a fish takes the bait just for you sake. That only you can mourn. That a stone falling into a gorge is of no significance. That a sambar deer, its head bent low to sip at a creek is not a revelation . . . When in fact the finest movement of any organism represents a change in an ecosystem.” The man with the compound eyes takes a deep sign and says: “But if you were any different you wouldn’t be human.

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

The greatest of our virtues and the worst of our sins is wanting nothing less than more.

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.

The social havoc wreaked by unfettered economic greed comes to be interiorised as the personal weakness and irresponsibility of those principally affected.

Mirrors on the ceiling,The pink champagne on iceAnd she said 'We are all just prisoners here, of our own device'And in the master's chambers,They gathered for the feastThey stab it with their steely knives,But they just can't kill the beastLast thing I remember, I wasRunning for the doorI had to find the passage backTo the place I was before'Relax,' said the night man,'We are programmed to receive.You can check out any time you like,But you can never leave ...

It seems to me that evil is a kind of ultimate greed, a greed that is so all-encompassing that it can't ever see anything lovely, rare, or precious without wanting to possess it. A greed so total that if it can't possess these things, it will destroy them rather than chance that someone else might have them. And a greed so intense that even having these things never causes it to lessen one iota -- the lovely, the rare and the precious never affect it except to make it want them.

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

Dozens of days, experiences, and encounters have set me on a path I never dreamed possible.

The communists may not have done very well in the end, but I can't help thinking of capitalism as merely the go-to religion of the greedy and selfish.

His strength for your weakness! His wisdom for your folly! His drive for your drift! His grace for your greed! His love for your lust! His peace for your problems! His joy for your sorrow! His plenty for your poverty!

(...) ha! what is hope? a butterfly in a boxof demons, and nothing escapes the darkuntainted, a mockery of politics and greedstamped with treason and dipped inmyths and force-fed brainwashinggoing off after a time for the grandmassacre of faith, humanity, and still we search, scorched feetfor life but find only fake plastic treessatirical, ludicrous, and ironic

The Bible warns us against greed and selfishness, it does encourage frugality and thrift.

Humility is a virtue of the heavenly, not arrogance. Are we the most superior beast on earth? No, not in strength and not in intelligence. It is very arrogant to assume that we are the most intelligent species when we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Both rats and monkeys have been shown to learn from error, yet we have not. More people have died in the name of religion than any other cause on earth. Is massacring God’s creations really serving God – or the devil? And what father would want to see his children constantly divided and fighting? What God would allow a single human life to be sacrificed for monetary gain? Again, the Creator or the devil?

Greed, corruption, violence, sin, deception all come from a lack of understanding that we’re all connected.

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

If I’m asking what kind of ‘return’ I should be expecting on the sacrifices I’m making, I have in that question revealed the need to ‘return’ that question to wherever I found it and have the word ‘return’ edited out of it.

Money makes people stupid. They don't have to work as hard as people who don't have money. That's why the smart people who do have money mostly use it for one thing… They use it to make sure the people without it don't get any more.

When greed transcends rationale, morality becomes irrelevant.

If you push your luck too hard, fortune's muscles might tear.

And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it, Heaven." Washington himself could be a hard driving businessman, yet he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason, he thought it the intent of the speculators, various tribes of money makers and stock jobbers of all denominations, to continue the war for their own private emolument, without considering that their avarice and thirst for gain must plunge everything in one common ruin.

...capitalism satisfied the Christian demand for an institution that channels selfish human desire toward the betterment of society. Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism - it is in human nature.

Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.

Pray for your needs, not your greed.

What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?

Don't envy what people have, emulate what they did to have it.

The God I believe in isn't short on cash, mister.

Pillars are fallen at thy feet Fanes quiver in the air A prostrate city is thy seat And thou alone art there.

Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed.

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.

Maybe we need to reflect on the fact that the patience of God always outruns the impatience of our greed, and that His love always outweighs the greed that outweighs our love for Him.

Instead of loving people and using money, people often love money and use people.

When is bliss of the self (Samadhi) experienced? It is when one does not want anything, when all the tubers of one’s greed goes away, then the bliss of the self (Samadhi) is experienced. Give away, how much you give (your things to others), that much (happiness) will be yours !

Organized scarcity is the best way to increase your profits.This is the idea of the ends justify the means. There are second and third order effects that will take away all of the gains and then some. Wisdom is better than gold, peace is better than profit.

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.

A motto of many politicians, public servants and money bags: Ask not 'What can I do for you?' but 'What can I do you for?

Wars and revolutions and battles, you see, are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

THE UNFORGIVENTell me if you've ever had to deal with these kinds of people:The kind who take and don't give.The kind to whom you give and give,And they keep asking.The kind to whom you give and give and they say you gave nothing.The kind whom have never offered anything,But act like they're the ones providingEVERYTHING.The kind you give and give,But take more than you can give.And when they have already taken everything,They get mad at you when you say you haveNothing more to give.The unforgiving,The misgiving,Wastefully living -And selfishly driven.The rat that never gives back,Yet is so quick to attack -Because they think the wordTAKINGSeriously meansGIVING.

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.

I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay hands on everything they can get.

And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men

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.

Lust is insatiable, whether it feeds on power, wealth, or flesh. It eventually consumes our morality and ultimately consumes our humanity.

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

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

Marty, my mother used to say "Never get greedy with God." I think what she meant was "Don't dare ask for more if you already have what you need."

There are two goddesses in your heard. The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, giver her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.

Money!It's all about money!It's all it ever is these days!

Another misconception is that desires are insatiable. Admittedly, for the small segment of society that is clinically deranged, this statement may not hold true. But for those seeking riches, pleasure, or power, too much of a good thing dulls the appetite.” – Jeremy Lyons [Survival of the Fittest]

CREEPOther people have written about war. About how one plane sweeps over and the whole place is ablaze in minutes. About how a young man may kill another young many with perfect legality. I prefer to write about less sudden things. About how we inch further away without even noticing. And then it's too late. Or is it? No it's not too late to say sorry, we were wrong, let's try again to get along. No, it's not too late to quit lying, halt the greed, stop polluting air earth and seas. I prefer to write about less noisy things. About change happening so gradually that one day you just accept the world as different. And you don't question because you're old, and you don't feel like making waves, and anyway, they'd say you were insane.......

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.

More people have died in the name of religion than any other cause on earth. Is massacring God's creations really serving God - or the devil? And what father would want to see his children constantly divided and fighting? What God would allow a single human life to be sacrificed for monetary gain? Again, the Creator or the devil?

Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, "What's in it for me?

I liked this rich lifestyle, but I loved the poor lifestyle better. The less money people had, the less greedy they seemed to be. The people who lived around our flocks seemed to always love everyone around them. Even though they aren’t always happy and can’t always afford the bills, they are still glad to be alive.

Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.

There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words 'I devise and bequeath.