Quotes About Greed

the fat cats used to send us into the mills to make their millions, and now they send us to the shopping centres.

Pile up that gold around my head. I must take it with me to pay the ferryman.' 'I thought it was just a coin on the eyes or something.' 'Inflation. Also, I'll take up rather a lot of room on the boat.

be a certain percentage of citizens who will try to strip-mine and suck dry everything they can

The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living - busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing - they are busy taking over.

For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one's holdings and legitimize one's greed. But both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion.

Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America's masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed.

and in the prison wall there's a hole so wide you could fit an hour's worth of corporate greed in it and have room left over for Dick Cheney's draft deferments. -Til Lunch Do Us Part

War is capitalism with the gloves off

He read greedily but understood selectively, choosing the bits and pieces of other men's ideas that supported whatever predilection he had at the moment.

We can be clear. We can identify the enemy. We can begin by asking ourselves what it is right rather than what is expedient. Know the difference between fever and the disease. Between racism and greed. We can be clear and we can be careful. Careful to avoid the imprisonment of the mind, the spirit, and the will of ourselves and those among whom we live. We can be careful of tolerating second-rate goals and secondhand ideas.

She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite? I am full

We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy.

What does 'poor' mean? No television?" Steve raised his eyebrows. "It means no money," said Bride. "Same thing," he answered. "No money, no television." "Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!" "Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?

The girl's face looks greedy, haughty and very lazy. The cream-at-the-top-of-the-milkpail face of someone who will never work for anything; someone who picks up things lying on other people's dressers and is not embarrassed when found out. It is the face of a sneak who glides over to your sink to rinse the fork you have laid by her plate. An inward face ---whatever it sees is its own self. You are there, it says, because I am looking at you.

Plenty in a world of excess and attending greed, which tilts resources to the rich and forces others to envy, is an almost obscene feature of a contemporary paradise.

He read greedily but understood selectively, choosing the bits and pieces of other men's ideas that supported whatever predilection he had

Plenty in a world of excess and attending greed, which tilts resources to the rich and forces others to envy, is an almost obscene feature of a contemporary paradise. In this world of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening before the dispossessed, the very idea of "plenty" as Utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be understood as a paradise-only state, but as normal, everyday, humane life.

If scientific language is about longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if religious language is discredited as contempt for the nonreligious; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if market language is merely an excuse for inciting greed; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom but "upgrade," where might we look for humanity's own future?

Enron, Halliburton, and WorldCom.

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest:

All around us we see a level of individual wealth unequaled since the early years of the 20th century.

The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.

Oh Christ, I just wanted you to fuck me. And then I became greedy, I wanted you to love me.

In a perfect world perhaps we would all see more clearly. But maybe it is enough to hope that each of us will share our talents, and find the balance between greed and benevolence that allows us to live and thrive and help the world around us grow.