Claude Adrien Helvetius Quotes

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

[Meanness] is more ingrained in man's nature than Prodigality; the mass of mankind are avaricious rather than open-handed.

It world be well had we more misers than we have among us.

Any time there is a lot of money or ego involved, people tend to behave badly.

The miser is as much in want of what he has as of what he has not.

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.

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

Avarice, the sphincter of the heart.

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

Greed is normally balanced by fear.

A man that hoards up riches and enjoys them not, is like an ass that carries gold and eats thistles.

The great corrupter of public man is the ego.

Greed, greed, greed. That’s the fundamental problem of mankind. If we can solve that problem, the rest of man’s problems would follow. The only thing that can undermine our free society is greed.

.... the forces of greed

The only thing wider than my family's mean streak is my family's cheap streak.

Avarice fills its purse at the expense of its belly.

The miser and the glutton are two facetious buzzards: one hides his store, and the other stores his hide.

CLOSE-FISTED, adj. Unduly desirous of keeping that which many meritorious persons wish to obtain.

Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.

The miser puts his gold pieces into a coffer; but as soon as the coffer is closed, it is as if it were empty.

In my opinion, every rich man is a miser.

A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.

Of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested; it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers.

The character of covetousness, is what a man generally acquires more through some niggardliness or ill grace in little and inconsiderable things, than in expenses of any consequence.

A man who is stingy with saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother.