Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.

Avarice, the spur of industry.

However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.

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.

Politics can't motivate people. The desire to get rich—that is the only way to mobilize the whole society.

Growing up, it was uncool to admit that your family had any money. And then, instantly, money was cool. In Reagan's parlance, it was about freedom of the individual, which was freedom to be greedy... individual versus society. There was a weird seduction in that, which I still feel.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

Make money. Make more money. Make others produce so as to make money... However you get them in or why, just do it.

In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.

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 forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

There is always greed. There is nothing wrong with greed.

The ideology and practice of individual acquisition, accumulation and concentration are now ascendant

What we call Monopoly is Business at the end of its journey. The concentration of wealth, the wiping out of the middle classes, are other names for it. To get it is, in the world of affairs, the chief end of man.

one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

Greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated—unfairly so in my opinion. … there's nothing wrong with avarice as a motive as long as it doesn't lead to dishonest … conduct.

Greed is good.

Although the market and opportunities for consumption seem to offer a counterbalance to the government's authoritarian powers, many Chinese are ambivalent about the forces of Westernization and marketization and the rapidly growing gap between rich and poor

So long as we maintain a substantial private sector, therefore socialists must logically applaud the accumulation of private profit.

I am not in Wall Street for my health.

The whole of this talk about America being more devoted to money than Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, or any other nation is nonsense.

Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere.

The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars.

It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it Enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, Covetousness has gone forward and never looked back.

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.