Quotes About Greed

Greed is gross. Greed is vile. Greed sucks.

How to get rid of the greed is the point and to get rid of the greed is that if I buy something - for whom should I buy this one, for whom should I buy? Ah, this will be all right for another friend of mine, like that. If you train your mind on these lines, not for yourself, but for others, then you'll be amazed this greed will run away and you'll have joy.

But in the financial markets, without proper institutional rules, there's the law of the jungle - because there's greed! There's nothing wrong with greed, per se. It's not that people are more greedy now than they were 20 years ago. But greed has to be tempered, first, by fear of losses. So if you bail people out, there's less fear. And second, b prudential regulation and supervision to avoid certain excesses.

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.

The original sin of Republicans is greed. Everyone understands greed. Everybody wants to get theirs. The original sin of Democrats is pity. Greed is more attractive, and a better motivator, than pity.

Right now I am full of greed and vanity, so I cannot live with you like before. But may be we can meet like this. I think just being together and talking would be nice. But when we grow old, when greed and vanity will be completely gone, when I will be tired of singing can I return to that place too?

It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.

If we didn't have greed, market economies wouldn't be as innovative as they are. But in my view, greed has to be contained by the fear of losses, so there has to be a system where, if you take too much risk, you go into bankruptcy. You don't systematically bail out people who take excessive risks.

It is amazing how many of the intelligentsia call it "greed" to want to keep what you have earned, but not greed to want to take away what somebody else has earned, and let politicians use it to buy votes.

We need to learn how to separate need from greed.

If our leaders are to enjoy the trappings of their position in the hierarchy, then we expect them to offer us protection. The problem is, for many of the overpaid leaders, we know that they took the money and perks and didn’t offer protection to their people. In some cases, they even sacrificed their people to protect or boost their own interests. This is what so viscerally offends us. We only accuse them of greed and excess when we feel they have violated the very definition of what it means to be a leader.

The white worker who has been displaced at General Motors has more in common with the displaced black worker than those larger white CEO's, and those Wall Street people who are determining their fate... whose thievery and greed is determining their fate.

The silence of the world could not rein back it's greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.

People sometimes ask me, because of the blacklisting, "Do you hate the government? Don't you hate white people?" No, it's greed that's the problem.

The currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.

Be fearful when there is greed and be greedy when there is fear.

Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

I think we crushed ourselves down over the centuries. Buried ourselves under greed and hate and whatever other sins we could find until our souls finally hit the rock bottom of the universe. And then they scraped a hole through it, into some ... darker place.

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.

I'm filled with despair. We live in a pathological culture filled with rage and bitterness and greed. The hate-mongering and racism is reaching a frightening pitch.

We all seem to be about aggression and greed. It's a massive pressure that affects us all.

Lyndon Johnson believed the poor deserved a better life than the economy was providing them. He thought private power and greed had to be checked by a vibrant democracy.

As conscious adult women, if we really do care about the state of girls and women worldwide, we need to train this next generation of girls because they are going to be the ones taking over and they are going to be the ones that shift this paradigm. Unfortunately for our generation, we've been raised in a society where greed trumps all. In other words, where the bottom line is money...where money affects how we perceive each other, and how we perceive ourselves and our value. We need to break that now with this younger generation.

Ignorance, hatred and greed are killing nature.

Nowadays, hoy en día, with our world full of war and violence and lack of love, a world full of greed, a world of domination, grasping power, venal stupidity, real evil, don’t get me started, it’s good to know that a conversation about tacos will always engender a sense of comfort and happiness. If only we could sit down at a big round world table and eat tacos in a spirit of love we might begin to work on world peace!

A wise man should order his interests, and set them all in their proper places. This order is often troubled by greed, which putsus upon pursuing so many things at once that, in eagerness for matters of less consideration, we grasp at trifles, and let go things of greater value.

But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.

We already have - thanks to technology, development, skills, the efficiency of our work - enough resources to satisfy all human needs. But we don't have enough resources, and we are unlikely ever to have, to satisfy human greed.

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.

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

He doesn't have super powers or the biggest, baddest gun. The point isn't how many people you can kill or how you kill them. He is there to fight piracy, greed, and cruelty in all their forms on land and sea

As humans try to evolve out of greed, let's put aside some wild places, protected lands, protected farms, things like that, since we may not evolve fast enough to protect nature.

Abundance is rooted in community, not individualism. Abundance is what is before our eyes, but we cannot see when we are blinded by greed.

Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

The practice of gratitude is incompatible with negative emotions and may actually diminish or deter such feelings as anger, bitterness, and greed.

We have suffered unnumbered ills and crimes in the name of the Law of the Land. Our men, women, and children have suffered not only the basic brutality of stoop labor, and the most obvious injustices of the system; they have also suffered the desperation of knowing that the system caters to the greed of callous men and not to our needs. Now we will suffer for the purpose of ending the poverty, the misery, and the injustice, with the hope that our children will not be exploited as we have been. They have imposed hungers on us, and now we hunger for justice.

I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled towards absolute honesty, one person whose good opinion of us becomes a substitute for the broader opinion of the world. And that opinion becomes more important than all our sneaky, sleazy schemes of greed, lust, self-aggrandizement, whatever we are up to while lying the world into believing we are just plain nice folks.

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That's why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another. -- Snow pg 119

Leadership is a privilege to better the lives of others. It is not an opportunity to satisfy personal greed.

Greed, the desire to incorporate, is magnified and fed back to produce the pretan realms, just as hate creates the hells.

Awareness is fire; it burns all that is wrong in you. It burns your ego. It burns your greed, it burns your possessiveness, it burns your jealousy - it burns all that is wrong and negative, and it enhances all that is beautiful, graceful, divine.

I believe capitalism will eventually be replaced by a communitarian ethic where the rights and care of all beings will be taken into consideration, not just the greed of a corporate few.

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.

To get rid of greed, you should try to do some sort of a collective social work.

We have seen that in this country in the last few years, particularly on Wall Street, with the rise of the old human frailty of greed. This occurs when people begin to serve only their own needs to the detriment of everyone else.