Greed Quotes - Page 16

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John Cobb is saying that perhaps we are beginning to see that now as our greed goes completely out of control and everything is seen through money, through corporate power, etc., etc. We know it well. He asked the question, What will be the holocaust that takes us to the next era? - which he describes as "Earthism."

The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the electorates' desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.

We find personal success and great, if not enduring, influence on the outer fashioning of the world allotted to the violent, the passionate individual who, unchaining the elemental principles of human impulse under favoring circumstances, points out to greed and self-indulgence the speedy pathways to their satisfaction.

I'm against American corporations buying politicians to remove limits to greed, capitalizing on other people's misery, actively creating misery on which to capitalize, "financializing" every moment of our enslaved lives. Then when China or somebody takes over, then it will be [them] doing those things that I'll be against.

Big religion was started with one goal in mind: to make money. And I'm not knocking anyone's faith, because I think there are a lot of good values to be found in any faith. But when any faith starts to get in the way of love, that's where you can tell that greed and fear have stepped in and that those things come from man.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral - it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

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.

Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.

I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?

I'm very much about the environment, I'm very much about health, about being able to, at the very least, eat organic, whole foods that are healthy for us. And then, of course, everyone being able to eat and at least have a humane way to live. There's enough for everybody, but unfortunately, there's a lot of greed and a lot of ego.

I'm not going to have the TV personality and be like, 'There's no bitterness. There's no ugliness.' There's bitterness. There's ugliness. There's pain. There's greed. There's malice, and there's hurt. That's all good stuff for any kind of art. I'm not necessarily feeding that side of myself, and I try not to encourage it too much.

'Dallas' hit a chord back in the late Seventies and Eighties because it was the age of greed: here you have this unapologetic character who is mean and nasty and ruthless and does it all with an evil grin. I think people related to JR back then because we all have someone we know exactly like him. Everyone in the world knows a JR.

Unquenchable is a worthy successor to Cadillac Desert that ably demonstrates how our most valuable resource is being squandered, ignored, and flushed away. Although it reminds us that water is indeed finite, Unquenchable clearly shows us the solutions to the greatest threat of the 21st century are limited only by politics and greed.

Adam Smith saw the greed of modern capitalism for what it was - a form of destructive ambition that may have favorable effects on the productive capacities of society, but which is of no direct benefit to anyone - not even to the greedy themselves, whose illusory chase after a will-o-the-wisp leaves them morally bankrupt and unhappy.

Nelson Mandela, Dada Vaswani, Harsh Mander, Shabana Azmi - I admire their humanitarian work. But sadly even Nelson Mandela could not keep corruption out of his cabinet and within a year, I am told, the victims of apartheid turned into perpetrators of corruption on their own people. Greed has no boundaries of colour or country does it?

We've got to temper anything we say with that. On the other hand, you've got to be serious about what you do. And you've got to understand the price you pay for frivolity or just for greed - it's a very high price, especially if you're involved in this sacred material, which is about the human heart and human desire and human tragedy.

They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.

When you question a man's motives, when you say they are acting out of greed, they are in the pocket of an interest group, et cetera. It's awful hard to reach consensus. It's awful hard to reach across the table and shake hands. No matter how bitterly you disagree, though, it is always possible if you question judgment and not motive.

Chicago's downtown seems to me to constitute, all in all, the best-looking twentieth-century city, the city where contemporary technique has best been matched by artistry, intelligence, and comparatively moderated greed. No doubt about it, if style were the one gauge, Chicago would be among the greatest of all the cities of the world.

Many Christians, though keenly sensitive to the dangers of greed and discontent that come with an economy of continually increasing consumption, nevertheless feel that it is worth risking if only it can end man's physical miseries. The trouble is that it can't. In a finite world, continually increasing consumption is just not possible.

When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. When it was hijacked first by advertising and then by commerce, it seemed like it had been fully co-opted and brought into line with human greed and ambition.

Stand in despair anywhere old-growth forest has been clear-felled. All life has been replaced by blackened, poisoned desolation. Animals and birds have either fled or been killed, and baits are laid waiting for those that should return. And in these tortured places, the devastation is brutal and total. And this is what greed looks like.

Governments are composed of human beings, and all of the frailties that humans possess are absorbed into these governments and become active within these governments. Hatred, anger, jealousy, fear, greed, distrust and the whole host of afflictions that humans must bear, lurk just beneath the surface of civility displayed by 'government.'

Sitting with a deck of cards in your hand all day is an obsession. Visiting print shops and bookstores and libraries is an obsession. And writing about this is an obsession. I think, in general, most collectors are obsessed. I think the only form of a rationalized greed is when you're collecting something you are supposedly serious about.

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 this really is true, then greed really isn't good, after all. It really isn't the way to maximize the best possible outcome. We really do need to come together and act collectively. Government isn't always the problem. It's sometimes the solution. And, so their whole intellectual scaffolding collapses. So, they'd rather deny the science.

A man must fortify himself and understand that a wise man who yields to laziness or anger or passion or love of drink, or who commits any other action prompted by impulse and inopportune, will probably find his fault condoned; but if he stoops to greed, he will not be pardoned, but render himself odious as a combination of all vices at once.

Wishing is the beginning of imagination. They practice wishing when they are young things, and then -when they have grown - they have a developed imagination. Which can do some harm - greed, that kind of thing - but more often does them some good. They can imagine that things might be different. Might be other than they seem. Could be better.

What being a socialist means is... that you hold out... a vision of society where poverty is absolutely unnecessary, where international relations are not based on greed... but on cooperation... where human beings can own the means of production and work together rather than having to work as semi-slaves to other people who can hire and fire.

Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.

What's interesting to 'Vikings' the series is that Horik is so blind in his greed and his desire for revenge that he can't hear reason, and he's probably so insecure about Ragnar that he won't take his advice. And straight up, honestly, if you ever have to say to someone, 'Hey, remember, I'm the king?' It's too late, and you've lost your authority.

Ebola haunted Zaire because of corruption and political repression. The virus had no secret powers, nor was it unusually contagious. For centuries Ebola had lurked in the jungles of central Africa. Its emergence into human populations required the special assistance of humanity's greatest vices : greed, corruption, arrogance, tyranny, and callousness.

You can go back to tulip bulbs in Holland 400 years ago. The human beings going through combinations of fear and greed and all of that sort of thing, their behavior can lead to bubbles. And it may have had and Internet bubble at one time, you've had a farm bubble, farmland bubble in the Midwest which resulted in all kinds of tragedy in the early '80s.

We're constantly dealing with old problems under the circumstance of new variables, so just things like greed and fear and anger and inequality are issues that humanity has constantly dealt with. The parameters and the variables change but these are old things. And discussing those things is slightly more timeless rather than focusing on one tiny thing.

Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.

There are parallels between the 1960s and now, because during the 1960s, people were being slaughtered, their lives were being taken, there was violence, greed, drugs were rising - just all of this. And my uncle was saying, you've got to come back to faith, hope and love. Now, you get the translation and say faith, hope and charity - faith, hope and love.

What made traditional economies so radically different and so very fundamentally dangerous to Western economies were the traditional principles of prosperity of Creation versus scarcity of resources, of sharing and distribution versus accumulation and greed, of kinship usage rights versus individual exclusive ownership rights, and of sustainability versus growth.

The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbour's wives! The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence--that sort of innocence. With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.

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?

The problems are our lives. In the "developed" countries, at least, the large problems occur because all of us are living either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong. It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy be cheap and plentiful.

The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream generated by imagining what the world would be like if everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract moral ideal-in this case, economic theories that assume all human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but scrupulously law-abiding), greed.

Until a few months ago we had a code of honor, and even the worst ruffians behaved with decency. You could leave your gold in a tent with no guard and no one would touch it, but now all that has changed. The law of the jungle rules, the only ideology is greed. Don't let yourself be parted from your weapons, and always travel in pairs or groups, because this is a land of thieves.

We need a new way of doing business to get out of the present crisis ... Absolute greed has come close to bankrupting the world. Thanks to the crisis that certain businesses have dumped on everyone a lot of people are going to suffer on a global scale. All of us must learn. It is all the more important that those business leaders that are left standing try to be a force for good.

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life are those which you yourselves, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Children, see and deplore: Free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel.

The frequency of anger attracts the frequency of anger, the frequency of greed attracts the frequency of greed, and so on. This is the law of attraction. Negativity attracts negativity, just as love attracts love. Therefore, the world of an angry person is filled with angry people, the world of a greedy person is filled with greedy people, and a loving person lives in a world of loving people.

Even without love, I can live fine alone. It's not like I've always had what I wanted. In my life not even once... I was never selfish nor full of greed. The things I want to do, the things I want, the things I wish for... have I ever even had any of those, for at least once in my whole life? I can live fine without love. I will find a way to survive. Dying is hell. Why is living supposed to be hell?

If we human beings rely only on material development, we can’t be sure of a positive outcome. Employing technology motivated by anger and hatred is likely to be destructive. It will only be beneficial if we seek the welfare of all beings. Human beings are the only species with the potential to destroy the world. Because of the risks of unrestrained desire and greed we need to cultivate contentment and simplicity.

For what will it profit men that a more prudent distribution and use of riches make it possible for them to gain even the whole world, if thereby they suffer the loss of their own souls? What will it profit to teach them sound principles in economics, if they permit themselves to be so swept away by selfishness, by unbridled and sordid greed, that hearing the commandments of the Lord, they do all things contrary.

Our incredible bewilderment (wilderness separation) blinds us from seeing that our many personal and global problems primarily result from our assault of and separation from the natural creation process within and around us. Our estrangement from nature leaves us wanting,and when we want there is never enough. Our insatiable wanting is called greed. It is a major source of our destructive dependencies and violence.

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