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From Macbeth To The Bible: The Best Greed Quotes

Here’s a selection of Greed Quotes, covering topics such as money, selflishness, corporate and life.

We really hope you enjoy these quotes and that they give you something to think about.

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

There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly west. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
Charlie Chaplin

Deregulation created this epidemic of greed which according to the rules of capitalism was OK. Beyond that there was criminal behaviour. There have been no repercussions and it’s hard to make your peace with.
Brad Pitt

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.
Stephen Hawking

Wall Street is broken for sure because it succumbed to greed and corruption and pure speculation with no values.
Deepak Chopra

Greed has taken the whole universe, and nobody is worried about their soul.
Little Richard

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
Socrates

As time goes on we get closer to that American Dream of there being a pie cut up and shared. Usually greed and selfishness prevent that and there is always one bad apple in every barrel.
Rick Danko

If you talk to most businessmen, they’ll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they’re just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.
P. J. O’Rourke

You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.
Vernon Howard

It’s time for greatness – not for greed. It’s a time for idealism – not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.
Marian Wright Edelman

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’
Joe Biden

Fear and greed are potent motivators. When both of these forces push in the same direction, virtually no human being can resist.
Andrew Weil

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
Maya Angelou

Greed is your god, kaz.”
he almost laughed at that. “no, inej. Greed bows to me. It is my servant and my lever.
Leigh Bardugo

So the unwanting soul
sees what’s hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.
Lao Tzu

Overwhelmed by the miraculous potentialities of the machine, our human greed has interfered with the biological cycle of human companionship which keeps the life of a community healthy.
Walter Gropius

The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.
Milton Friedman

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.
B.C. Forbes

To those supporters who were told that I abandoned them, that is untrue. I abandoned greed, corruption, and compromise, never you, and never the artistic gifts and abilities that sustained me.
Lauryn Hill

Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.
Bernie Sanders

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
Warren Buffett

What we’re seeing now is that greed is still alive and kicking, and banks are bigger than ever.
Brad Pitt

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed… a race for rent.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Greed has driven the world crazy. And I think I’m lucky that I have a place over here that I can call home.
Nina Simone

Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed?
Milton Friedman

Greed is the lack of confidence of one’s own ability to create.
Vanna Bonta

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Edward Abbey

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

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating. It means nothing.
Ben Stein

It is greed to do all the talking but not to want to listen at all.
Democritus

Harveys opened against the backdrop of Thatcher’s greed culture.
Marco Pierre White

Our labour preserves us from three great evils — weariness, vice, and want.
Voltaire

Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles.
Harry S. Truman

Do not follow vain desires; for verily he who prospers is preserved from lust, greed and anger.
Abu Bakr

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
Oscar Wilde

A greedy person and a pauper are practically one and the same.
Swiss Proverb

I believe in the sun. In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed and forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.
Joy Harjo

Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others.
unsuccessful people are always asking, “what’s in it for me?.
Brian Tracy

There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.
Siddharta Gautama

That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.
Anthony Doerr

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

Greed is the inventor of injustice as well as the current enforcer.
Julian Casablancas

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J. R. R. Tolkien

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
Shirley Chisholm

Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough.
Janwillem Van De Wetering

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
Jim Elliot

Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.
Albert Einstein

If it weren’t for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no mozart, no van gough, no muppets and no louis armstrong.
Jasper Fforde

Where do the evils like corruption arise from? It comes from the never-ending greed. The fight for corruption-free ethical society will have to be fought against this greed and replace it with ‘what can I give’ spirit.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. There is no greater guilt than discontent. And there is no greater disaster than greed.
Lau Tzu

If we weren’t born with anti-social passions – narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious – why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?
Dennis Prager

The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
Anatole France

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.
Friedrich Engels

In our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.
Margaret J. Wheatley

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
Blaise Pascal

We have to knock down the barriers erected by greed, special interests, powerful forces.
Hillary Clinton

I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.
Michel de Montaigne

You say, ‘If I had a little more, I should be very satisfied.’ You make a mistake. If you are not content with what you have, you would not be satisfied if it were doubled.
Charles Spurgeon

The master said, “a true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.”
(analects 4.9).
Confucius

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
Edgar Allan Poe

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.
Nigel Farage

A healthy desire for wealth is not greed. It’s a desire for life.
Jen Sincero

Microsoft is not about greed. It’s about innovation and fairness.
Bill Gates

There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.
Mahatma Gandhi

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Thomas Jefferson

The ignorant mind, with its infinite afflictions, passions, and evils, is rooted in the three poisons. Greed, anger, and delusion.
Bodhidharma

America needs young people to be inspired to choose sacrifice over greed.
Jesse Jackson

I didn’t do it because of the underlying greed that’s prevailing, but it is about greed, doing the right thing at the right time using your clout when you have it and what for and what reason.
Danny DeVito

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
Thoreau

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.
Edwin Way Teale

The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
James Baldwin

Why can a grisha possess but one amplifier? I will answer this question instead: what is infinite? the universe and the greed of men.
Leigh Bardugo

Manifest plainness,
embrace simplicity,
reduce selfishness,
have few desires.
Lao Tzu

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

The only thing wrong with the NBA – or any other professional sport, for that matter – is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overweening Greed. There is no Mystery about it, and no need to change any rules.
Hunter S. Thompson

Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
Garrison Keillor

Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.
Mark Twain

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
Kierkegaard

If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.
Jacques Yves Cousteau

Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful
Warren Buffett

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.
Mahatma Gandhi

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