Piero de' Medici Quotes

When the State of Texas became ... part of the Union, flocks of vampires, in the guise of men, came ... with ... corrupt hearts and the most perverse intentions ... Because ... your industry excited ... their vile avarice ... many of you Mexicans have been robbed of your property, incarcerated ... murdered and hunted like wild beasts. Mexicans! Is there no remedy for you?

A city in which the nobles obtain their desire, is nothing else but a company of masters and slaves ordered to the satisfaction of the avarice and dishonest wishes of the ruling class.

Democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses têtes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people

[A] representative of... a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, Blood.

There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.

Corruption is just another form of tyranny.

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

I believe the root of all evil is abuse of power.

Yes, citizens, Iturbide was a traitor, a hypocrite and an impious man who destroyed the assembly in which the people had deposited their sovereignty in order to appropriate it all to himself

I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or few is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, 'Give, give.'

Depravity is so widespread that our land is depopulated …. Monstrous greed motivates our subjects, even Christians, to seize members of their own families to sell them as slaves.

Things are being done in Ireland which would disgrace the blackest annals of the lowest despotism in Europe.

Who does not know that kings and rulers sprang from men who were ignorant of God, who assumed because of blind greed and intolerable presumption to make themselves masters of other men, their equals, by means of pride, violence, bad faith, murder, and almost every other kind of crime? Surely the devil drove them on.

All riches come from iniquity, and unless one has lost, another cannot gain.

It is necessary to put down the horrible abuses. These abuses must end or I will retire from the Congo. I will not allow myself to be spattered with blood or mud; it is necessary that these villainies cease.

There were also very great robberies and murder of our principal men. This was done in pretense indeed for the public welfare, but in reality for the hopes of gain to themselves

O, you anarchic scum, you cowardly murderers, you leeches upon honest labor, you midnight assassins!

The kings are ravenous beasts, their ministers are dogs.

What right have the rulers of nations to unsheath the sword of destruction, and to let loose the demons of desolation upon mankind, whenever caprice or pride, ambition or avarice, shall prescribe?

Those who have no sense of right, reason or religion, have a natural propensity to make use of their strength to the destruction of such as are weaker than they.

Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.

I just want people to see what I deem as a war for no reason, but only for greed.

In vain doth valour bleed, While Avarice and Rapine share the land.

To get rich, one must have but a single idea, one fixed, hard, immutable thought: the desire to make a heap of gold. And in order to increase this heap of gold, one must be inflexible, a usurer, thief, extortionist, and murderer! And one must especially mistreat the small and the weak! And when this mountain of gold has been amassed, one can climb up on it, and from up on the summit, a smile on one's lips, one can contemplate the valley of poor wretches that one has created.