Quotes About Greed

That's the problem with wishes, they ensnare you. In fairy tales they're nothing but trouble, magnifying the greed and vanity of the person for whom they are granted.

An embittered Douglass declared the United States a tyranny, a nation of corrupted memory, abandoning its victories in favor of power, greed, racial fear, and pride.

The geometry of judgment is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a circle that diminishes to a point, then to nothing. Pride is such a snake, and envy, and greed. Love, however, is a hoop, a wheel, that rolls on forever. We are rescued by those whom we have rescued. The saved become the saviors of their saviors.

Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines.

Carley saw two forces in life--the destructive and constructive. On the one side greed, selfishness, materialism: on the other generosity, sacrifice, and idealism.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.

But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory. —Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

You won't git far and you won't be long, when dat big gut reach over and grab dat little one

How can a nation speak with one voice if they are not one? Don't forget, now. If you do, you encourage all the stupid but greedy and ambitious to sprout like toadstools and that's the end of right and reason in the state. Coddling and wheedling is not going to stop these destroyers. To a haughty belly, kindness is hard to swallow and harder to digest.

Things are done according to money these days.

Anytime money is your main focus, I think we all come to problems.

La avaricia empieza cuando se acaba la pobreza

That cursed ball! All the world thinks I am worth millions. Yet Lourdois had a look that was not natural; there's a snake in the grass somewhere.

Corruption has come to him with fortune, — as it always does!" he said to himself

I promised myself that I would go through everything thoroughly; I would try the ceilings, and floors, and walls, and cornices to discover all the gold, hoarded with such passionate greed by a Dutch miser worthy of a Rembrandt's brush. In all the course of my professional career I have never seen such impressive signs of the eccentricity of avarice.

La santa criatura ignoraba que donde empieza la ambición cesan los sentimientos ingenuos.

Abbi cura di tutto! Me ne renderai conto laggiù", dimostrando con quest'ultima parola che il cristianesimo deve essere la religione degli avari.

Corruption is powerful in the world: talent is scarce. So corruption is the instrument of swarming mediocrity, and you will feel its point everywhere. You will see wives whose husbands have six thousand francs a year, all told, spend more than ten thousand on a dress. You will see officials with a salary of twelve hundred francs buy estates.

Látta feje fölött elrepülni a démont, akit oly könny? angyalnak nézni, a csillogó szárnyú sátánt, aki drágaköveket hajigál, aranynyilait a paloták homlokzatára lövelli, bíborba öltözteti a n?ket, és ostoba fénnyel árasztja el az eredetileg oly egyszer? trónokat: hallgatta a hiúság istenének rikoltozását, akinek hamis csillogása mintha a hatalmat jelképezné.

As for me, I'm not duped by his misfortunes; he doesn't look like a man who fails to get the best of things! Somebody finds him a good place, and there he is, leading the life of a Sardanapalus with a ballet-girl, and guzzling the funds of his journal; that costs the mother another twelve thousand francs! I don't care two straws for myself, but Philippe will bring that poor woman to beggary.

Money has never yet lost the smallest opportunity of proving its own stupidity.

The actors in this scene, so full of interest, commonplace as it seems, were provided with bits of pasteboard striped in many colors and numbered, and with counters of blue glass, and they appeared to be listening to the jokes of the notary, who never drew a number without making a remark, while in fact they were all thinking of Monsieur Grandet's millions.

Money brings everything to you; even your daughters.

The prodigality of millionaires is comparable only to their greed of gain. Let some whim or passion seize them and money is of no account. In fact these Croesuses find whims and passions harder to come by than gold.