Avarice Quotes

No salaries should be allowed the public Officers, but that their necessary expenses should be defrayed. This would make Men, he said, more desirous of obtaining the Esteem of their Country-men, than avaricious or eager in the pursuit of wealth.

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests.

All amassing of wealth or hoarding of wealth above and beyond one's legitimate needs is theft.

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She well knows that by enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom.

The chief of these [problems governing Korea] arise from the character of the Koreans. Many of them are crooked. They want "squeeze" from the Japanese and their own people. They are lazy.

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money's sake.

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

Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us.

Gold thou mayst safely touch; but if it stick Unto thy hands, it woundeth to the quick.

The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

I think that money spoils most things, once it becomes the primary motivating force.

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or galantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

There's always a little jump to your heart when you realize you've got looting.

Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

Those whose life is long still strive for gain, and for all mortals all things take second place to money.

Money is the worst currency that ever grew among mankind. This sacks cities, this drives men from their homes, this teaches and corrupts the worthiest minds to turn base deeds.

Rich people without wisdom and learning are but sheep with golden fleeces.

What the object of senile avarice may be I cannot conceive. For can there be anything more absurd than to seek more journey money, the less there remains of the journey?

It has always seemed strange to me. The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.