quotations about greed
Greed is a way of avoiding making choices: if I have everything I don't have to choose what I want. And choosing what I want means giving up some pleasures for other pleasures.
ADAM PHILLIPS
On Balance
Covetousness is an eager desire of getting and keeping the goods of this life in a manner that is contrary to the command of God, and inconsistent with the welfare of men. It consists in an habitual tendency or lust of the soul, whereby it is carried out and inclined towards the enjoyment of worldly riches, as its highest and chiefest good.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Greedy people are poor. If they weren't poor, why would they still want "more?"
HSUAN HUA
The Wonderful LDharma Lotus Flower Sutra
To what do you not drive human hearts, cursed for craving gold!
ARIANA FRANKLIN
Mistress of the Art of Death
Money does not sate Avarice, but stimulates it.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
He who wishes to grow rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
The remoteness of greed from our private life doesn't simply make it easy to condemn, it makes it easy to defend. That's what explains the slogan "greed is good." That phrase was originally supposed to evoke the audience's repugnance when Michael Douglas uttered it in the movie Wall Street, taking it in turn from an actual remark of the financier Ivan Boesky. But the champions of the market system have adopted it as a defiant way of praising untrammeled acquisitiveness as the source of economic growth and all the good things it brings with it.
GEOFFREY NUNBERG
Going Nucular
When we think of greed in relation to market activity, several things come to mind. We tend to think of consumerism, materialism, envy, egoism, ruthlessness, and the like. All of this represents a disordered human appetite. The disordered appetite, not the appetite itself, presents the problem. In a moral understanding of the world, we say that something is disordered when it is imbalanced and disregards reason as well as the mandate of Scripture. We see how deeply unethical and disordered something is especially when it leads us to disregard the dignity of other people, to use them as objects or tools for our own pleasure rather than as persons who are ends within themselves. Naturally, this would apply as well to the way in which some people disregard their own dignity by "workaholism" and a sense of work solely animated by greed.
ROBERT A. SIRICO
"The Moral Potential of the Free Economy", For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty
With education and development, greed is modified into ordinary selfishness, and becomes a desire for better things or improved conditions. Then follows enlightened self-interest which recognizes obligations to others, and through the different phases of liberality to the other extreme of excessive sympathy or misplaced generosity which pauperizes the recipients, and works injuries hardly less than the exactions of sordid greed.
CHARLES HUBERT MCDERMOTT
The Gospel of Greed
So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain; which taketh away the life of the owners thereof.
SOLOMON
Proverbs 1:19
Greed puts out the sun.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Other Wind
A house built on greed cannot long endure.
EDWARD ABBEY
Postcards from Ed
Greed is an attempt to cash in on laziness.
PHILIP JOHN MILLER
Onwords and Upwords
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
Greed bows to me. It is my servant and my lever.
LEIGH BARDUGO
Six of Crows
I frankly don't see anything wrong with greed. I think that the people who are always attacking greed would be more consistent with their position if they refused their next salary increase. I don't see even the most Left-Wing scholar in this country scornfully burning his salary check. In other words, "greed" simply means that you are trying to relieve the nature-given scarcity that man was born with. Greed will continue until the Garden of Eden arrives, when everything is superabundant, and we don't have to worry about economics at all.
MURRAY N. ROTHBARD
Economic Controversies
It should be easy to see how the sins of greed, avarice, and envy run much deeper than their mere reflection in material objects. These vices, like the roots of many moral failings, are first related to the internal disposition or direction of our hearts, which later leads to pronounced external manifestations. The reason this is important to grasp is that if we are going to identify or remedy a vice such as greed, it does little good to identify the external matter as if it were the root cause of the moral problem. This is too superficial. We need to keep in mind that the vice of avarice does not apply only to material things. It is about a general imbalance to living: certainly an unbalanced value placed on riches for their own sake, but also a person's desire for fulfillment in status, prestige, or living for the approval of others. The antidote to this vice is achieving and maintaining balance in our relation to things and people.
ROBERT A. SIRICO
"The Moral Potential of the Free Economy", For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty
Greed is merely a species of nearsightedness.
HENRY FORD
introduction, My Life and Work
No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
JESUS
Matthew 6:24
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
ERICH FROMM
Escape from Freedom