79 Greed Quotes

The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.

When they asked Jack Benny to do something for the Actor's Orphanage - he shot both his parents and moved in.

The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.

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

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.

A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends.

Often when looking at a mass of things for sale, he would say to himself, 'How many things I have no need of!'

Artists aren't necessarily business people. And they aren't necessarily aware of all the things that go on in their names. Some just want to make some music, but there is a lot of greed among artists as well. Whether or not we know it, we are all to blame. I think it's time - starting with the artist - to try to be a little more responsible and aware of what goes on in our name.

Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say 'But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it.' Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: 'I want something more', because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.

The greatest crimes are not those committed for the sake of necessity but those committed for the sake of superfluity. One does not become a tyrant to avoid exposure to the cold.

Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.

Polygamy: An endeavour to get more out of life than there is in it.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP Only he didn't say 'doggone.''

Some men are called sagacious, merely on account of their avarice: whereas a child can clench its fist the moment it is born.

Give a beggar a dime and he'll bless you. Give him a dollar and he'll curse you for witholding the rest of your fortune. Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom.

In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness.

But now well democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses tetes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people. They talk about cutting off the heads of the grosses tetes but now we know that there will be other grosses tetes and the will be all the same. (New York: Liveright, 1970, p. 28)

In order to stave off covetousness, greed, and spite, citizens world over must be educated.

The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life out of them, molding them into money.

It would take too long to discuss or argue every single case, or to sift through the whole of the Law for precise witness against such greed. Sufficient to say, greed is a deadly deed. You shall not covet your neighbor's goods. You shall not murder. A homicide may not stand beside Christ. Even 'He who bates his brother is to be labeled murderer.' Or, 'He who does not love his brother dwells in death.' therefore how much more guilty is he, who has stained his own hands in the blood of the sons of God, those very children whom only just now he has won for himself in this distant land by means of our feeble encouragement.

The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it. [p.260]

What female heart can gold despise? What cat's averse to fish?

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all- by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians- be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

All women dote upon an idle man Although their children need a rich estate. No man has ever lived that had enough Of children's gratitude or woman's love.

Other lands became a larder full of all the good things All we had to do was go and take Blood the colour of the rain that grew our wicked harvest Black the colour icing on our cake

The man who sailed around his soul From East to West, from pole to pole With ego as his drunken captain Greed, the mutineer, had trapped all reason in the hold

It (New York City) is a great monument to the power of money and greed:a race for rent.

Although they possess enough, and more than enough, still they yearn for more.

each generation wastes a little more of the future with greed and lust for riches

Ah! Five hundred years I have toiled to entice this creature, despairing, doubting, brooding by night, yet never abandoning hope that my calculations were accurate and my great talisman cogent. Then, when finally it appears, you fall upon it for no other reason than to sate your repulsive gluttony!

The wealth of a churchman God gives it, and the Devil takes it away.

Ask a great money-maker what he wants to do with his money, - he never knows. He doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he may get it. 'What will you make of what you have got?' you ask. 'Well, I'll get more,' he says. Just as at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. So all that great foul city of London there, - rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, - a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore, - you fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very nasty play and very hard play, but still play.

This time Milo had gone too far. Bombing his own men and planes was more than even the most phlegmatic observer could stomach, and it looked like the end for him...Milo was all washed up until he opened his books to the public and disclosed the tremendous profit he had made.

So much for all the prayers you've learned. They are no help to basic needs. And all the worlds they've shown you Just make you even greedier.

'I don't share your greed. The only card I need is the Ace of Spades'- From 'Ace of Spades'

All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew.

Now you, Coroticus- and your gangsters, rebels all against Christ, now where do you see yourselves? You gave away girls like prizes: not yet women, but baptized. All for some petty temporal gain that will pass in the very next instant. 'Like a cloud passes, or smoke blown in the wind,' so will 'sinners, who cheat, slip away from the face of the Lord. But the just will feast for sure' with Christ. 'They will judge the nations' and unjust kings 'they will lord over' for world after world. Amen.

Be charitable before Wealth makes thee covetous.

That disease Of which all old men sicken,-avarice.

He disdains all things above his reach, and preferreth all countries above his own.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

'Whatever you need sold I'll sell it. Bring in a tank and I'll sell the fuckin thing.' (from 'Car Salesman')

If we don't get Dave Treen out of office, there won't be anything left to steal.

You think it a great triumph to make the sun draw brown landscapes for you! That was also a discovery, and some day may be useful. But the sun had drawn landscapes before for you, not in brown, but in green, and blue, and all imaginable colours, here in England. Not one of you ever looked at them, then; not one of you cares for the loss of them, now, when you have shut the sun out with smoke, so that he can draw nothing more, except brown blots through a hole in a box. There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening, - Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light - walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the Times calls 'Railroad Enterprise.' You Enterprised a Railroad through the valley - you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange - you Fools Everywhere.

Are you infected with the same disease of lust, gluttony and greed? Then watch the ones with the biggest smiles The idle jabbers...Cuz they're the backstabbers ~Money

Now that I'm strugglin in this business, by any means/Label me greedy gettin green, but seldom seen

Semper avarus eget.

Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat.

'Yay, Old'uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds and made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts of humans, yay, a hunger for more: Human hunger birthed the Civilise, but human hunger killed it too.' ? (p.287)

Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it.

How stupid and shortsighted the ruling class really is! Cupidity is stone blind. It has no vision. The greedy, profit-seeking exploiter cannot see beyond the end of his nose. He can see a chance for an 'opening'; he is cunning enough to know what graft is and where it is, and how it can be secured, but vision he has none - not the slightest. He knows nothing of the great throbbing world that spreads out in all directions. He has no capacity for literature; no appreciation of art; no soul for beauty. That is the penalty the parasites pay for the violation of the laws of life.

Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools.

I made a killing on Wall Steet a few years ago...I shot my broker.

In my opinion, every rich man is a miser.

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet- the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

The principle saboteur, the man with the cheap fistful of dollars.

Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!

With one hand he put A penny in the urn of poverty, And with the other took a shilling out.