Quotes About Excess

As in the 1960s, oil and energy were now available in abundance and, thus, they were not a constraint on economic growth. Supplies were safe again. Excess oil capacity around the world exceeded demand by 10 million barrels per day, equivalent to 20 percent of the free world's consumption.

I think greed sometimes gets the best of everybody.

It's our greed to extract more and more from good that turns it into evil.

Greed, in the end, fails even the greedy.

It is possible to satisfy your need. It is impossible to satisfy your greed.

Greed is so destructive. It destroys everything.

"In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has."

I drank my lifetime supply of alcohol and I took my lifetime supply of drugs between the ages of 15 and 19.

Excess of everything is worst

Intemperance is a hydra with a hundred heads. She never stalks abroad unaccompanied with impurity, anger, and the most infamous profligacies.

The more local and settled the culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert.

Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. As almost any barber can testify, there is also more than needs to be told, and more than anybody wants to hear.

But even democracy ruins itself by excess—of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses (588). "As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them" (

emotions as a rule are in excess, and detain the mind in the contemplation of one object so that it cannot think of others."93 But "desire that arises from pleasure or pain which has reference to one or certain parts of the body has no advantage to man as a whole."94 To be ourselves we must complete ourselves.

Youth is the age of extremes: "if the young commit a fault it is always on the side of excess and exaggeration." The great difficulty of youth (and of many of youth's elders) is to get out of one extreme without falling into its opposite.

Perhaps discipline will be restored in our civilization through the military training required by the challenges of war. The freedom of the part varies with the security of the whole; individualism will diminish in America and England as geographical protection ceases. Sexual license may cure itself through its own excess; our unmoored children may live to see order and modesty become fashionable; clothing will be more stimulating than nudity.

All forms of governments destroy themselves, by carrying their basic principles to excess. Democracies become too free in politics, in economics, in morals – even in literature and art, until at last even the dogs in our homes, rise up on their hind legs and demand their rights. Disorder grows to such a point that society will then abandon all its liberty to anyone who can restore order.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.

Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.

Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy. ... The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. ... Dip him in the river who loves water. ... A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. ... The hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure. ... Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.

El camino del exceso conduce al palacio de la sabiduría.

You'll grow devilish fat upon this paper-diet!

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.