Greed Quotes

“Unlike money and sex, the lust for power, fame and influence often goes unnoticed.”
― Abhaidev, Notes from the Edge of Sanity

“Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society’s economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The “ideological superstructure” of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories.”
― Ludwig Von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality

“I was simultaneously elated and depressed, a common enough state of mind these days when people are offered a great deal of money to do something repugnant.”
― James Hamilton-Paterson, Cooking with Fernet Branca

“People can be persuaded to desire almost anything, for a time, if they are constantly told that it is something to which they are entitled and which is unjustly withheld from them.”
― T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

“I hate that man down there," he said quietly. "I hate everything he stands for. There is no passion in him, no love, no pride. Only ambition. Nothing matters but that. Nothing in the world can move him to pity or grief but his own fate. Everything is a tool, an instrument. He wants the Emperor's Tiara, everyone knows it, but he doesn't want it for anything. He only wants. I doubt anything in his life has ever moved him to feel anything for anyone else ... love, loss, anything.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

“Don't take the bribes of the Cold Queen so she can feel better when she sleeps in her gilded bed!”
― Raven Kennedy, Glint

“Clocks measure coins, not time.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot

“The ocean does not forgive greed; it simply waits to return the debt.”
― Lawrence Nault

“He’s going to walk away with it,’ he said. ‘He’s just throwing words around. The Trunk’s too big to fail. Too many investors. He’ll get more money, keep the system going just this side of disaster, then let it collapse. Buy it up then via another company, maybe, at a knock-down price.’

‘I’d suspect him of anything,’ said Miss Dearheart. ‘But you sound very certain.’

‘That’s what I’d do,’ said Moist, ‘er . . . if I was that kind of person. It’s the oldest trick in the book. You get the punt— you get others so deeply involved that they don’t dare fold.

It’s the dream, you see? They think if they stay in it’ll all work out. They daren’t think it’s all a dream.

You use big words to tell them it’s going to be jam tomorrow and they hope. But they’ll never win. Part of them knows that, but the rest of them never listens to it. The house always wins.’

‘Why do people like Gilt get away with it?’

‘I just told you. It’s because people hope. They’ll believe that someone will sell them a real diamond for a dollar. Sorry.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Power never disappears. It only changes hands.”
-THE LOST GOLD-”
― C. K. MALACH, THE LOST GOLD: Power Never Disappears. It Changes Hands.

“El deseo de estabilidad es inherente al ser humano, pero en su esencia, es sencillo: cuanto más anhelas, menos satisfacción encuentras. Así, los ricos, consumidos por su insaciable avaricia, terminan sumidos en una miseria comparable al infierno”
― Stef S. Magalhães

“Money attracts money, service inspires service.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“कामना जब धर्म से विमुख हो जाती है, तो वह 'लोलुपता' बन जाती है।”
― Pradyumna Kumar Tiwari, त्रिकूट: धर्म का चक्रव्यूह

“Love and right defeated at the moment is always stronger than cowardliness and greed and evil triumphant.”
― Cornel West

“Any system that’s propped up to feed mostly greed is doomed to fail.”
― Omar Delawar

“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy. To deal with those issues we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists do not know how to do that.”
― Gus Speth

“The Hemlock Toast
by Stewart Stafford

The eternal orphan, courtesy of
Clean-room medieval alchemists.
The mirror's software crash loop,
Coining infinity’s counterfeit lucre.

Chimera revenue streams pour in
From the yawning, ethics-bored abyss.
A blind taste test of phantom brew —
A gun barrel spun with a hemlock bullet.

Reading market forecasts in our entrails,
On altars of a bought and sold society.
Accept the corrupt transfusion — deal done.
The commodified jury was never about truth.

© 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“If you think you're using real money forget it. You're just using the adult version of play money.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“If preservation of life depends on purchasing power, civilization has already failed.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“Fat-choy waddled off to his quarters. He had, that day, ordered an old beggar whipped out of town, condemned a thieving imposter to the Collar of Punishment, imprisoned half a dozen rogues to prevent them from committing offenses they might have contemplated in the future, and decided in favor of litigants who had impressed him with the righteousness of their purses and their generosity in sharing the contents with him, and he was altogether fatigued by dispensing so much justice.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“Komisar je bil velik ljubitelj vseh umetniških in manufakturnih izdelkov, najvišje pa je cenil papirnate rublje.
(iz zgodbe Nos)”
― Nikolai Gogol, Plašč

“Struggle against the White Man who wants everything for himself. The Whites are like a flood tide. Little by little a million hungry tongues will lick away ... at the islands, until they have disappeared.”
― Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Don Goyo

“[Cats and the City]
Place:
an Arab city.
Time:
the age of defeat,
a new age
of humiliation
in the twenty-first century.
General condition:
“Elegant” neighborhoods,
lavish houses
with walls
the color of graves,
beautiful gardens,
and flowers
no one dares
to smell.
Imported cars,
imported devices,
and endless shops
for every consumer good
the mind can imagine.
Between one restaurant
and the next,
a shop
for clothes and gifts.
All built
with perfect skill
upon the crust
of the same old wound,
a wound ready
to bleed profusely
at the first scratch
of a fingernail.
After walking
some distance,
the lights disappear,
the glitter disappears,
and a pitch-darkness
falls
over the city.
Suddenly,
I find myself alone,
hearing nothing
but the sound
of my footsteps,
and the meowing
of thin cats
covered in the soot
of daily life.
A desperate, miserable cat
approaches me,
begging
for its daily bread,
or perhaps
its monthly one.
I give it
a piece of my sandwich.
It takes it
and runs away quickly
to celebrate
the bite of a lifetime,
leaving me alone
in the dark,
wondering:
Which reflects
the city’s truth more,
the luxurious neighborhoods
under the lights,
or the cats
starving
in the dark?

June 8, 2014”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“Greed is a sort of ‘inversion of virtue’ that attempts to solve an internal emptiness with external accumulation. Seeing things from that perspective makes you want to be sympathetic to Capitalists, yet strangely, I am not. Perhaps if their flawed logic and inhumane incentives didn’t run and shape the entire world, it would be a different story. Sympathy dissolves when a system expands to the point where no one can escape its consequences.”
― Omar Delawar

“Greed, acquisitiveness, dishonesty, cruelty and violence were for so many generations useful to animals and men that not all our laws, our education, our morals and our religions can quite stamp them out; some of them, doubtless, have a certain survival value even today. The animal gorges himself because he does not know when he may find food again; this uncertainty is the origin of greed. The Yakuts have been known to eat forty pounds of meat in one day; and similar stories, only less heroic, are told of the Eskimos and the natives of Australia. Economic security is too recent an achievement of civilization to have eliminated this natural greed; it still appears in the insatiable acquisitiveness whereby the fretful modern man or woman stores up gold, or other goods, that may in emergency be turned into food.”
― Will Durant, Story of Civilization

“You can't burn the world and then expect to profit from the ashes.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“Most admirable, for she has never sold her soul (going so coldly for the gold). 'Cause she's a soul that holds all those coins only as tools (before they're some ultimate goal).”
― Criss Jami

“imagining
your existence is made
harmless by death,

for the world has teeth
& is always hungry, is full
of so many precious things

& they don't all belong
to you”
― Isaac Pickell, everything saved will be last

“If there are only two cookies
and one person
takes both of them--
grabs both of them--
that leaves no cookies for anyone else.

But if we make more,
there are more cookies.

Do you make cookies
or just take cookies?
Cookie makers are actually, traditionally,
happier and healthier
than cookie takers.”
― Shellen Lubin

“While market competition acts as a natural restraint on corporate greed, political greed operates without checks, creating an unhindered race to the bottom.”
― Colin M. McGroarty