Quotes About Greed

A short cut to riches is to subtract from our desires.

I see the ground is the symbol for the poor people; the poor people is gonna open up this whole world and swallow up the rich people, 'cause the rich people gonna be so fat, they gonna be so appetizing, you know what I'm saying, wealthy, appetizing. The poor gonna be so poor and hungry, you know what I'm saying? It's gonna be like — there might be some cannibalism out this mother. They might eat the rich.

The grass may be greener on the other side but the the water bill is higher.

No matter how hard you hug your money, it never hugs back.

Honest poverty lives happily; ill gotten wealth worries.

Pigs get fat hogs get slaughtered.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.

Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid.

Money is the root of all evil, but the foliage is fascinating.

They're clinking glasses and knocking it back to their hearts' content. Tastes so good they can't stop. Ain't you heard the old saying: 'Money comes from God and the Devil collects it?' Well, the Devil's collecting his share now.

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

When Joseph Conrad saw how Europeans behaved in Congo in 1890, he described them as "reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage…To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe." More than a hundred years later, not much has changed.

Race Some bite from the others A leg an arm or whatever Take it between their teeth Run out as fast as they can Cover it up with earth The others scatter everywhere Sniff look sniff look Dig up the whole earth If they are lucky and find an arm Or leg or whatever It's their turn to bite The game continues at a lively pace As long as there are arms As long as there are legs As long as there is anything

All human suffering springs from unbridled desire. Unless one extricates oneself from the clutch of greed, one will not free himself from the fetters of sorrow.

Drug companies don't have hearts or consciences. They want to sell you drugs. The company doesn't give a fig whether the drug makes you ill or kills you. The company just wants your money.

No matter how much you have, that voice of "more would be better" drives you to make acquisition the name of your game. Greed is one of the many strings in the human heart, and it can be pro-survival, but unchecked by a sense of fairness, balance, and love, it can gut our capacity for joy.

The Hoover Commission agreed. Leisure was not, in fact, an excuse to relax. It was a hole to fill up with more wants (which, in turn, required more work to pay for them). Somehow the consumer solution satisfied both the industrial hedonists hell-bent on achieving a material paradise and the puritans who feared that unoccupied leisure would lead to sin. In fact, the new consumerism promoted all the deadly sins (lust, covetousness, gluttony, pride, envy) except perhaps anger and sloth.

Having more is an endless horizon, no matter how much you have.

Marketing theory says that people are driven by fear, by the promise of exclusivity, by guilt and greed, and by the need for approval. Advertising technology, armed with market research and sophisticated psychology, aims to throw us off balance emotionally—and then promises to resolve our discomfort with a product.

If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough. In an environment of more is better, "enough" is like the horizon—always receding. You lose the ability to identify that point of sufficiency at which you can choose to stop. This is a psychological cul-de-sac, an invisible catch-22 of the consumer myth of more. If more is better, then what I have is not enough.

If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.

We no longer live life. We consume it.

Some people want everything for nothing.