Thomas Shepard Quotes

Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him.

This has resulted in more and more people becoming inner-directed and having as their only goal, getting as much as they can get out of the system and putting as little into it as possible.

When you look at it that way, you can see how absurd it is that we individualize ourselves with our fences and hoarded possessions.

America always pivots between collective responsibility and the idea that the individual can pull himself up by his bootstraps.

Mr. Greed, why do you have to own everything that you see?

We're into an age of excessive individuals, all right. We're into the age were independence, autonomy, convenience, sometimes selfishness. The new trinity of me, myself and I, seems to dominate. We know that's contrary to the very nature of the human person. The very nature of the human person needs God and needs other people.

Whatever we treasure for ourselves separates us from others; our possessions are our limitations.

money appears to motivate only our interest in ourselves, making us selfish and self-centered...Money makes people feel self-sufficient, which also means they don't need or care about others; it's each man for himself

In the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual; in Africa, it is the extended family or the collective.

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.

Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.

You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength.

False riches, consisting of money, houses and lands, acquired by selfish means at cost to others and thereafter used selfishly, are almost always used for the oppression of other persons.

I change my mind so much, I'm better going on my own. Shopping is a selfish activity anyway.

President Obama is casting his lot in the middle of a debate as old as America itself: Are we rugged individualists pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps? Or are we a nation of community, all connected and counting on one another?

Greed is a sin because humans are social creatures. And they simply cannot survive without the opposite of greed, which is cooperation.

Countless are the women parasites who, to satisfy their craving for pleasure and luxury, impoverish father or husband. These lame limbs in the social organism, which themselves accomplish nothing, but for whom all other limbs work, are the most flagrant example of womanly immorality in the present.

Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants' civilization, you are part of the group; you don't live for yourself alone.

… an avalanche of avarice

After I asked him [a student] what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement. No decent society can tolerate that definition.

… a creed of greed

.... the forces of greed

There is something about prosperity that brings out the worst in some people.

Consumerist ads brainwash us into individualist and egotistic self-love.