Greed Quotes - Page 2

With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive.

Cathy, don't look so defeated. She was only trying to put us downagain.Maybe nothing did work out right for her, but that doesn't mean we aredoomed. Let's go forth tomorrow with no great expectations of findingperfection. Then, expecting only a small share of happiness, we won'tbe disappointed."If a little hill of happiness would satisfy Chris, good for him. Butafter all these years of striving, hoping, dreaming, longing-I wanted amountain high! A hill wasn't enough. From this day forward, I vowedto myself, I was in control of my life. Not fate, notGod, not even Chris was ever again going to tell me what to do, ordominate me in any way. From this day forward, I was my own person, totake what I would, when I would, and I would answer only to myself. I'dbeen kept prisoner, held captive by greed. I'd been betrayed,deceived, tied to, used, poisoned ... but all that was over now.

Progress begins when you liberate your mind from the shackles of your ingrained tendencies of authoritarianism – the tendencies of greed – the tendencies of hatred, rage and lust.

When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.

The communists may not have done very well in the end, but I can't help thinking of capitalism as merely the go-to religion of the greedy and selfish.

What is the authority in your life? Is it your selfishness? Your lust? Your greed? Or have you turned it all over to God and said, “Lord, You are going to be my authority”? When you are under authority, you are then able to assume authority.

When you stopped to think about it, he reflected, there weren't many things in life one truly needed. To want too much was worse than greed: it was stupidity - a waste of precious time and effort.

The greatest of our virtues and the worst of our sins is wanting nothing less than more.

People who are distracted by door money, neglect the production and the audience. Money becomes their god. They sacrifice their reputation in favor of building revenue. Believe me; the former is more difficult to recover if lost.

Greed like the love of comfort is a kind of fear.

Love is blind. Love of money is blind. Greed and money make people forfeit the quiddity of life, banish them from what is essential and alienate them from themselves. They lose their identity and become drifting exiles. ( "Money rocking and rolling" )

Beware of those who are always hungry, for they will feed you to the wolves just to get paid.

Son, let me tell you a little something about the environment… you can try to fix it up all you want, but it’s a waste of time. Sooner or later we’ll all be doomed… slaughtered by terrorists, baked in the heat of the sun, nuked until our shadows glow… greed is good. We don’t exist to help other people, we exist to grow the hell up, have kids, get old and die, while consuming all we can. Nothing comes after. There’s no wrath, no day of reckoning… we just go. POOF! We have no reason to aspire to change the world, son. We’ll thrive by feeding off of whatever’s available. How else do you think we ended up rich? You don’t get ahead by being nice, Thomas.

Hoarding kings are to be pitied in their lifetimewhen they can't take their richesto the

Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing

Greed is the seed of corruptionas much as virtue is the seed of justice.Wisdom is the seed of successas much as vice is the seed of destruction.

Those that much covet are with gain so fond,For what they have not, that which they possessThey scatter and unloose it from their bond,And so, by hoping more, they have but less;Or, gaining more, the profit of excessIs but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain,That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain.

The clearest version of vision, backed by the purest grade of greed is a ripen file of failure.

The real problem is I'm greedy. I want complete, utter, unceasing bliss. But I don't want to fall into it either. If happiness were money I wouldn't want to win the lottery. I want to accomplish it, urn it as John Houseman would say. I want it to be an achievement because I want to be in control of my life. I don't want things to happen to me, I want them to happen because of me. Power I want. I want to feel the way I do when I stretch a new canvas and I want to feel that way all the time. the blank canvas fills me with the power of imminent creation. I'm its god an it always bends to my will and when I'm done I know, inside, that it's markedly better than what almost all of my similarly-engaged others can achieve. That's happiness.

Ambition's ambition is immortality. To create an eternal legacy.

Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed.

Lust for power, greed, false religions reign today because of lack of vision and passion to redeem nations

Individuals with greed for power see others as elements to be oppressed.

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.

Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.

Day and night - ruthlessly apply key lessons of mankind such as leaving greed, fear and lust to improve the efficiency & effectiveness of life.

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society’s economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The “ideological superstructure” of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories.

It is in the nature of man to want what he does not have. This modern concern for happiness seems a real testimony of its absence.

-Money? in a voice that rustled.

Greed is supported by an endless cast of what-ifs. Greedy people can never have enough to satisfy the need they feel in light of every conceivable eventuality.

I started toward the barn and was grateful that the wind was still. About halfway up the drive, my heart began to beat an irregular rhythm as I caught sight of Cricket coming toward me. My breath caught in my throat. This girl. This tiny little girl had such incredible power over me with her big, blue, round, sad eyes. Her unusual face, her unusually striking face. Her pert nose. The faint laugh lines around her eyes and mouth. And I didn’t know her, didn’t really even know if she and I were anything alike but that didn’t stop me from wishing we shared a future...even if she did belong to someone else.

People's behaviors are messages, not a diagnosis because I can no longer discern the world's version of insanity.

No matter where you go, there’s always something to deal with; if it’s not greed, it’s lust, or envy, or pride, or something else. You just have to live your life so uncorrupted that it offsets the corruption as much as possible.

This is where people misunderstand war. When you attack another country for its resources, you are the pirate. But when you protect your country from the pirates, you are the hero.

The single and peculiar mind is boundWith all the strength and armor of the mindTo keep itself from noyance, but much moreThat spirit upon whose weal depends and restsThe lives of many. The cess of majestyDies not alone, but like a gulf doth drawWhat's near it with it; or it is a massy wheelFixed on the summit of the highest mount,To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser thingsAre mortised and adjoined, which, when it falls,Each small annexment, petty consequence,Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never aloneDid the king sigh, but with a general groan.

The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves.

A Woman who let out a Sigh Outside a Mansion, should Never ask her Husband Why He Works Late

All told, over the period 1932-1980, nearly half a century, the top federal income tax rate in the United States averaged 81 percent.

I cannot live to hear the news from England.But I do prophesy th' election lightsOn Fortinbras; he has my dying voice.So tell him, with th' occurents, more and less,Which have solicited - the rest is silence.

i used to thinki was brokenbecausei never oncespent mydaydreamsplucking swollen pomegranatesfrom someone else's tree.- then i learned that society is broken, not me.

War, money and greed that is the modern heinous Trinity, and they are inseparable these days.

The whole idea of government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

Why can a Grisha possess but one amplifier? I will answer this question instead: What is infinite? The universe and the greed of men.

Fidelity surveyed a group with at least $1 million investment assets excluding real estate and retirement. 42% of them did not FEEL wealthy.

Any man who neglects his conscience is a dangerous animal.

The Master said, “The gentleman does not serve as a vessel.”(Analects 2.12)

We recklessly attempt to disguise our ‘greed’ by dressing it in the garb of other nobler ideals such as ‘rights’ and ‘privileges.’ Yet, if we dare dress ‘greed’ in an authentic sense of thankfulness, greed will suffocate within the folds of that very clothing.

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

And the so-called 'political process' is a fraud: Our elected officials, like our bureaucratic functionaries, like even our judges, are largely the indentured servants of the commercial interests.

They'd taken everything. Everything, and people simply had let them. People had meekly surrendered the world to them in hopes those CEOs would finally have enough, finally have reason to leave them be. But Tom knew better.

All right people, listen up! If you've got a family back home waiting for you or if you just want to save your own skin, turn around and walk away. Also, women! I have no intention of fighting any women!

The God I believe in believes in me and won’t silence my heart or others based on a paycheck at the end of the day.

What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?

A foolish environmentalist wants to save nature from the greed of the market by exposing it to the tragedy of the commons. A smart environmentalist wants to save nature from the tragedy of the commons by exposing it to the greed of the market.

Focus on patience, loyalty, intelligence, greed, dissatisfaction and pride.

We cherish reprobates, not for their cruelty, but for their little show of patronage.

We had no compunction toward our enemies [the ants] and took to increasingly desperate and violent means of dealing with them. If we noticed they'd laid siege to a snack, we might trap them in a circle drawn with water and take away whatever they were eating, then watch them scurry about in confusion before wiping them off the floor with a wet cloth. I took pleasure in seeing them shrivel into black points when burning coals were rolled over them. When they attacked an unwashed pan or cup they'd soon be mercilessly drowned. I suppose initially each of us did these things only when we were alone, but in time, we began to be openly cruel. We came around to Amma's view of them as demons come to swallow our home and became a family that took pleasure in their destruction. We might have changed houses since, but habits are harder to change.

WHO AM I?I have seven heavenly panelsLeading up to a pointed sphereI’m multidimensional like a crystalAnd my center is never clear.I’m an inventor and pioneer.A mentor to my peers.But I'm not as sound as my shell reveals,Because I’m tormented by my fears -That may appear to be groundedBut my insides are filled with tears.And the sadness is well-founded,From years and yearsOf traumatic experiencesCompoundedIn the most dementedAtmospheres.I talk but feel like nobody hears.Has reason disappeared?And, God, are you near?This is Giza’s 7th light forceAnd I'm asking you to interfere.I can no longer walk amongst the blind and deadWith open eyes and ears.I’m trying to maintain my sanityAnd to straighten up my veneerAs I roll amongst the growing calamitiesFlowing on Earth’s severely trashedFrontier.Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)

Mankind, in all his lusts, punishes himself. The gods have to do very little.

The problem: If you've an antique for sale, then, sad to relate, the world isn't your oyster. It's not that easy. Even if somebody gives you the National Gallery, your options are still very, very limited. Okay, you can sell the Old Masters, set up a trust, buy your favorite brewery. But that's strictly it. You're limited by honesty on one hand and law - that hobble of sanity - on the other.