Quotes About Greed

The desire for money may be an indication of greed, but I want to argue that greed is a much more subtle vice than simply the desire to be rich.

The greedy man is he who habitually eats too much, knowing that he is injuring his bodily health thereby, and this is a vice to which not the gourmet but the gourmand is a slave.

Moliere exaggerates common vices of mankind: lust, greed, misanthropy, hypocrisy. We all have a touch of these.

Nelson Mandela, Dada Vaswani, Harsh Mander, Shabana Azmi - I admire their humanitarian work. But sadly even Nelson Mandela could not keep corruption out of his cabinet and within a year, I am told, the victims of apartheid turned into perpetrators of corruption on their own people. Greed has no boundaries of colour or country does it?

Troubled are they who want the world, troubled are they who have it.

Justice may be blind but it loves the sound of money.

Corruption is not a moral problem, it is a distribution system and a way of amassing power.

Possession. Demand. Control. He wants it all.

Consciously or not, greed and power are deadly partners.

Greed is a stronger force than gravity.

It's been my experience that mankind—and I use that to encompass all the races—is seldom satisfied with what they have. Most people's striving is harmless, beneficial even. But there are those who strive for subjugation, having control over others' lives, lives held in the palm of their hand.

Money. Man is always motivated by money, my dad said to me once. It can work for us, or it can enslave us. Even when we have much, we feel like we need more. No matter how much we have.

But you just keep wagging your pricey manicure and that horse-choking diamond bracelet at me. That helps make it all seem so much more right.

Did the dead still want things? Or was death simply a letting go of all that is held so tightly in life—an understanding of the temporal and shallow nature of the human matters of possession, greed, desire, justice?

But men are so full of greed today, they'll sell anything for a little piece of money.

Love of money is the disease which renders us most pitiful and grovelling, and love of pleasure is that which renders us most despicable.

Damned, damned be the rich! May not even their fingernails be left!... I'm sure that they are going to Hell head-first.

All money is blood money.

Because if you do, Kit, if you see a shocking secret that someone desperately wants to keep hidden, you could be in trouble. People—rich people—will do anything to protect themselves

Imagine Smaug's treasure hoard. Now imagine Smaug with crippling levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and fanatic good taste.

And from the perspective of those in need, that extra quarter of a million bucks your material person spent on the prestige addition for his house looks like an awful lot of lifesaving food and medicine that could have existed if the jerk with the big house in the suburbs hadn't blown it all to artificially inflate his sociogeographic penis.

Politics is the purview of scoundrels, tyrants, and fools.

I think men who lust for power are capable of almost anything.

Greed is a nice, sterile motivation. If the money's right, you don't need to know someone to take advantage of them. You don't have to hate them, or love them, or be related to them. You don't even have to know who they are. You just have to want money more than you want them to keep on breathing, and if history is any indicator, that isn't a terribly uncommon frame of mind.