#greed

These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. ↗

— John Muir

#greed #nature #nature

[Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing. ↗

— Aristophanes

#attributes #barter #character #demagoguery #government

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. ↗

— Matt Taibbi

#democracy #elections #government #greed #wall-street

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#criminal-justice-system #cycle-of-violence #desperation #greed #homelessness

Yahweh: You've been unhappy because you've desired things that cannot be. Lucifer: That's what desire IS. The need for what we can't have. The need for what's readily available is called greed. ↗

— Mike Carey

#god #lucifer #yahweh #greed

I will tell you the secret to getting rich on Wall Street. You try to be greedy when others are fearful. And you try to be fearful when others are greedy. ↗

— Warren Buffett

#greed #rich #wall-street #greed

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. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#library #readers #greed

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics. ↗

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

#greed #greed

Aching all over, we reached level ground again, and Mr. Christy withdrew his claims, and agreed that no road anywhere else could possibly be so bad as a Mexican road; a decision which later experiences only served to confirm. ↗

— Edward Burnett Tylor

#again #agreed #anywhere #bad #christy

I think the best actors are the most generous, the kindest, the greatest people and at their worst they are vain, greedy and insecure. ↗

— Kenneth Branagh

#generous #greatest #greedy #i #i think