Talk:Greed

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• We're all born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.
  • Mignon McLaughlin

• Callous greed grows pious very fast.
  • Lillian Hellman

• It is a sin directly against one's neighbour, since one man cannot over-abound in external riches, without another man lacking them.
  • Thomas Aquinas, 13th Century Italian theologian

• Sufficient to say, greed is a deadly deed. You shall not covet your neighbor's goods.
  • Saint Patrick, 5th Century Roman-British Christian bishop and missionary

• Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.
  • Mohandas K. Gandhi

• One of the weaknesses of our age is our apparent inability to distinguish our needs from our greeds.
  • Don Robinson

• Remember: Greed is a bad color on a person.
  • Bill Engvall, American commedian. (Quotation from The Bill Engvall Show).

• A covetous man is good to none, but worst to himself.
  • Latin proverb.

• Covetousness bursts the sack.
  • English 19th Century proverb.

• Beggars make rags, rags make paper, paper makes money, money makes banks, banks make loans, loans make beggars...
  • Old anonymous verse.

Non-notable

• The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms: greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind, and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
  • Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the film, Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone, screnplay by Stanley Weiser.

• The excesses of the 80s must not reappear in the 90s, The last thing we need now is a return to the 80s philosophy of 'greed is good' and that the only useful interest is self-interest.
  • Paul Keating, speech in Bankstown, New South Wales, February 24, 1993.

• what man calls civilization
  always results in deserts
  man is never on the square
  he uses up the fat and greenery of the earth
  each generation wastes a little more
  of the future with greed and lust for riches
  • Don Marquis, "What the Ants Are Saying," stanza 5, Archy Does His Part, in The Lives and Times of Archy & Mehitabel (1950), p. 475.

• Greed often finds more pleasure in taking from others than in giving to itself.
  • Simon May, English philosopher. The Pocket Philosopher: a handbook of Aphorisms (1999).

• If you take away ideology, you are left with a case by case ethics which in practise ends up as me first, me only, and in rampant greed.
  • Richard Nelson, American playwright. From the Independent (UK) newspaper, 12th July 1989.

• Enter stranger, but take heed
  Of what awaits the sin of greed,
  For those who take, but do not earn,
  Must pay most dearly in their turn.
  • J. K. Rowling, 'Diagon Alley', Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997).

• Mutual indulgence has already declined into selfish appetite; now, that appetite becomes aware of the incompatible and equally selfish appetites of other people. Indifference becomes mutual antagonism, imaged here by the antagonism between hoarding and squandering.
  • Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell, notes on Canto VII, pg. 114, (1949)

• I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.
  • Thomas Sowell, American economist and political commentator. Barbarians Inside the Gates: And Other Controversial Essays (1999).

• There is nothing inherently wrong with greed as a human motivator—greed motivating evolution.
  • Oliver Stone, American film director. Taken from DVD Director's commentory (2000) on his film, Wall Street.

• Lesson number one: Don't underestimate ... the other guy's greed!
  • Oliver Stone. A quotation from his script of the film, Scarface, 1983.

• If money is, as it is often posited, the root of all evil, then where does that leave greed? Let's do the math: Greed takes up most of your time and most of your money, so therefore greed = time x money. And, as we all know, time = money. Ergo, greed = money x money. So, if money is the square root of all evil, then we are forced to conclude that greed is evil as well, perhaps even more so, in that it forced us to do math.
  But when does the desire to simply possess something turn into unchecked greed? That's easy: when the things that you possess start possessing you.
  • Dale E. Basye and Bob Dob, in Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (2009), "Backword", p. 361.

• Greed will always leave you dissatisfied because you'll never be able to get everything you desire. Greed never allows you to think you have enough; it always destroys you by making you strive ever harder for more.
  • Rabbi Benjamin Blech, American academic and writer. Taking Stock: A Spiritual Guide to Rising Above Life's Financial Ups and Downs (2003).

• Marketers keep inventing desires, necessities for you and for me. I need this. I need that. I need. I need. It’s the need of a smoking fit. If you don’t smoke that cigarette now, you’ll die—when in reality you die because you succumb to the rage and rattle of the needy greed that keeps you busy needing more and more things. Is this the American Dream—the greedy need?"
  • Giannina Braschi, United States of Banana (2011).

• Greed is eternal.
  • Ira Steven Behr, Rule 10, The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition (1995).