Quotes About Greed

Greed arises only because your present moment is empty, and to live in an empty moment hurts very much. To forget it you project greed into the future, thinking that tomorrow things are going to be better, a lottery is going to open in your name. But of course you have to wait for tomorrow, it cannot be just now - and tomorrow never comes. All that comes is always the present moment, which is empty. Greed is because we don't know how to live the present moment in its total richness.

Many people and companies only have one goal: money, money, and more money. Greed is ok when you let others profit from it, but greed for oneself is bad, it makes you ill.

"As I think I told you once before," said I, "it is you who have been, in your greed and cunning, against all the world. It may be profitable to you to reflect, in future, that there never were greed and cunning in the world yet, that did not do too much, and overreach themselves. It is as certain as death."

Greed is good to most economists. It's greed that makes people work harder, be more productive and helps the economy grow.

America has gone crazy with greed. I really have to say that.

The inescapable fact is that when we build a society based on greed, selfishness, and ruthless competition, the fruits we can expect to reap are economic insecurity at home and international discord abroad.

Peace and the survival of life on earth as we know it are threatened by human activities which lack a commitment to humanitarian values. Destruction of nature and nature's resources result from ignorance, greed and lack of respect for the earth's living things.

What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.

I like to think that my arrogance, impetuosity, impatience, selfishness and greed are the qualities that make me the lovable chap I am.

I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of inner peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion and elimination of ignorance, selfishness and greed.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

The world has enough women who are tough; we need women who are tender. There are enough women who are coarse; we need women who are kind. There are enough women who are rude; we need women who are refined. We have enough women of fame and fortune; we need more women of faith. We have enough greed; we need more goodness. We have enough vanity; we need more virtue. We have enough popularity; we need more purity.

All human suffering springs from unbridled desire. Unless one extricates oneself from the clutch of greed, one will not free himself from the fetters of sorrow.

Meditation is nothing but an effort to drop all the foreign elements so that you can see yourself as you were before you were born, mirrored in its purity. It is a great silence and a great joy to be there, and once you start abiding there, there is no death and no time. All fear, all greed, all anger, disappears: one is just there with no idea, no desire.

Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it.

That is what is so marvelous about Europe; the people long ago learned that space and beauty and quiet refuges in a great city, where children may play and old people sit in the sun, are of far more value to the inhabitants than real estate taxes and contractors' greed.

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

Ubuntu is not a biblical concept but an ancient African one. Nevertheless it falls back on one simple thing: that humans have been created for togetherness, and what drives us apart is greed, lust for power, and a sense of exclusion, but those are aberrations.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.

For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.

Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

Mr. Greed, why do you have to own everything that you see?

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.

Greed is an imperfection that defiles the mind; hate is an imperfection that defiles the mind; delusion is an imperfection that defiles the mind.

For Democrats to win, they're going to have to address the needs of working people. They're going to have to address the needs of the middle class. And that means standing up to Wall Street, standing up to the greed of corporate America. Even now and then, standing up to the media. And that means having a candidate who can excite working families, excite young people, bring them into the political process, create a large voter turnout.

If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.

There is no fire like greed, No crime like hatred, No sorrow like separation, No sickness like hunger of heart, And no joy like the joy of freedom. Health, contentment and trust Are your greatest possessions, And freedom your greatest joy. Look within. Be still. Free from fear and attachment, Know the sweet joy of living in the way.

If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.

The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

Let us not forget such words, and all they mean, as hatred, bitterness, and rancor greed, intolerance, bigotry; let us renew our faith and pledge to man, his right to be himself and free.

The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I'm kidding. But killing helps.

This America has been the country of greed rather than the country of need.

One of the most dangerously vicious circles menacing the continued existence of all mankind arises through that grim striving for the highest possible position within the ranked order, in other words, the reckless pursuit of power which combines with an insatiable greed of neurotic proportions that the results of acquired power confer.

If we do not cling to riches, selfishness or greed - then I believe we are getting closer to God.

The speculators deadly enemies are: Ignorance, greed, fear and hope. All the statute books in the world and all the rules of all the Exchanges on earth cannot eliminate these from the human animal.

Envy and greed starve on a steady diet of thanksgiving.

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.

I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo: your time has come - and gone. It's time for change in America.

I think what the secretary Hillary Clinton has recognized is the American people are extremely angry about the power of Wall Street, the greed, the illegal behavior of Wall Street.

If development is the new name for peace, war and preparations for war are the major enemy of the healthy development of peoples. If we take the common good of all humanity as our norm, instead of individual greed, peace would be possible.

what man calls civilizationalways results in desertsman is never on the squarehe uses up the fat and greenery of the eartheach generation wastes a little moreof the future with greed and lust for riches

At the heart of every really good Christmas movie is the threat, I suppose, to Christmas. Something is wrong with Christmas, in all of these movies. In 'The Polar Express,' there's a kid that doesn't really believe, and that's the threat to Christmas. In 'Santa Claus: The Movie,' jealousy and greed are threatening to overrun his Christmas.

If the firms that employ an increasing majority of the population are driven solely to satisfy the owner's greed at the expense of working conditions, of the stability of the community, and of the health of the environment, chances are that the quality of our lives will be worse than it is now.

People's lives are forever controlled by two emotions: fear and greed.

Cast aside those who liken godliness to whimsy and who try to combine their greed for wealth with their desire for a happy afterlife.

In 'Tarahumara' land, there was no crime, war or theft. There was no corruption, obesity, drug addiction, greed, wife-beating, child abuse, heart disease, high blood pressure, or carbon emissions. They didn't get diabetes, or depressed, or even old: 50-year-olds outran teenagers.