Quotes about Greed

Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.

Nirvana means to extinguish the burning fires of the Three Poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance. This can be accomplished by letting go of dissatisfaction.

Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.

It has been written that the meek shall inherit the earth. What has not been written is that they shall inherit it after the greedy and the selfish have already polluted the air, fouled the water and poisoned the food chain.  The actual moral of the parable is stand up for yourself, for our planet and for all who dwell here.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition.  It asks too little of yourself. ... Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Those who have much are often greedy, those who have little always share.

It's a mystery to me;
We have a greed, with which we have agreed.
You think you have to want more than you need.
Until you have it all, you won't be free.

"The corporation cannot be ethical, its only responsibility is to make a profit."

Lord, if I can't have what I want, let me want what I have.

When money talks, morals walk.

Corporately contrived art product replaces inspired intellectual property with ineffectual poperty.

Commercial interests with their advertising industry do not want people to develop contentment and less greed.  Military interests in economic, political, ethnic or nationalist guises, do not want people to develop more tolerance, nonviolence and compassion.  And ruling groups in general, in whatever sort of hierarchy do not want the ruled to become too insightful, too independent, too creative on their own, as the danger is that they will become insubordinate, rebellious, and unproductive in their alloted tasks.

War has contaned the seeds of its own demise all along. This primal form of zero-sum energy, through the very logic of history that it helped impel, was bound to grow more and more negative-sum until finally its downside was too glaring to ignore. In retrospect, it looks almost like planned obsolescence.

If war can indeed be turned into a relic, then the virtue of greed will recede further. From a given society's standpoint, one big upside of wanton material acquisition has traditionally been the way it drives technological progress—which, after all, helps keep societies strong. In the nineteenth century, Russia ans Germany had little choice about modernizing; in those days stasis invited conquest. But if societies no longer face conquest, breakneck technological advance is an offer they can refuse, and frugality a luxury people can afford.

God knows greed won't vanish. Neither will hatred or chauvanism. Human nature is a stubborn thing. But it isn't beyond control. Even if our core impulses can;t be banished, they can be tempered and redirected.
   

Greed is a dog; falsehood is a filthy street-sweeper. Cheating is eating a rotting carcass. Slandering others is putting the filth of others into your own mouth. The fire of anger is the outcaste who burns dead bodies at the crematorium.

Suppose hypothetically that one out of every 200 people or so is a jerk.  In today's world these jerks will discover that if they enter government or business they can become super rich and powerful jerks.  Do we conclude, therefore, that markets (or government) have caused greed?  No, the fact is that once we no longer live in tiny tribes of 200, anonymity allows some people, who would have been assholes in a small tribe but who would have been sanctioned there, to go off and become jerks on a much, much larger scale.

Technology, including Zaadz, will allow us to evade the jerks far more than we could before.  The technology-based social responsibility movement, broadly construed, will allow us to return to some extent to the moral monitoring of small villages.

There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.
There is no greater guilt than discontentment.
And there is no greater disaster than greed.

It is a feeble compassion that pulls up short where self-interest begins

It is a feeble compassion that pulls up short where self-interest begins

It is a feeble compassion that pulls up short where self-interest begins

It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.

There is much suffering in the world - physical, material, mental. The suffering of some can be blamed on the greed of others. The material and physical suffering is suffering from hunger, from homelessness, from all kinds of diseases. But the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, having no one. I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.

We give our lives to that which we give our time. I have learned that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to unclutter one's life by starting at the top of the pile with the idea that the solution is to just get things sorted and better organized. It is nice to get better organized, but that is not enough. Much has to be discarded. We must actually get rid of it. To do this we need to develop a list of basics, a list of those things that are indispensable to our mortal welfare and happiness and our eternal salvation. This list must follow the gospel pattern and contain the elements needed for our sanctification and perfection. It must be the product of inspiration and prayerful judgment between the things we really need and things we just want. It should separate need from greed. It must be our best understanding of those things that are important as opposed to those things that are just interesting.

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness, except greed.

For greed all nature is too little.

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs; we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.

A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.

Two hungry wolves do not do so much havoc to a flock of sheep as greed and desire do to one's religion.

What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of system.