Ed Schultz Quotes

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.

But men are so full of greed today, they'll sell anything for a little piece of money.

You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker.

Avarice, the spur of industry.

As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the '80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences.

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

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.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

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

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

Money commands everything because that's our interpretation of capitalism... what kind of world is that? It's a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots.

The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade and dickering, not principle.

Internationalism, illustrated by the Bolshevik and by the men to whom all countries are alike provided they can make money out of them, is to me repulsive.

The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

Selfish men, and this country is not without them, men whose mounting bankrolls loom larger than your happiness, corporations without souls and without virtue, those fearful that this government might impinge on what they have grown to regard as its immemorial right of exploitation will whisper against us. They will call us radicals. They will say that this is the first step on the road to socialism.

… egotists, exploiters and aristocrats

The selfish spirit of commerce which knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.

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.

It is idle to attack Imperialism or Militarism as political expedients or policies unless the axe is laid at the economic root of the tree, and the classes for whose interest Imperialism works are shorn of the surplus revenues which seek this outlet.

Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism.

Greed is good.

War is capitalism with the gloves off …

The chief agent responsible for promoting the passions at the expense of justice turns out to be wealth.

Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak.