Economic Greed Quotes

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.

… what these people feel an enormous urge to do is not just to collect more money for themselves, but they feel impelled to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the programs that working people and the poor survive on…. These people are addicted to greed and money and it is a sickness that is destroying the economy of America.

It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands.

Here's the problem: Profiteers haunt America, and for everything we try to control, someone's going to profit from it, more than you control it.

What we're seeing now is that greed is still alive and kicking, and banks are bigger than ever.

When Jesus comes back, these crazy, greedy, capitalistic men are gonna kill him again.

We [Americans] have to get beyond the greed-run-amok. We have to get beyond indifference to the poor and working people. We have to get beyond polarized politics.

Reclaim our environment from those who would destroy it with their predatory economic behavior.

What happened under communism - and increasingly, is happening in America, as Joseph Sobran put it: 'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer.'

Airport expansion is just one example of how our planet is being plundered for profit.

What happens is all these things we're seeing – campylobacter, E coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella, that weren't even in the lexicon 30 years ago – that is the industrial paradigm exceeding its efficiency. So these Latin squiggly words that we're learning to say – bovine spongiform encephalopathy – are nature's language screaming to us: ENOUGH! And the question then is: what will it take for us to listen? And my contention is that Wall Street is still wearing conquistador mentality and uniforms, and nobody is listening to the pleadings of nature saying: 'Enough.'

Arab leaders worry more about making money from the profits they get from oil and gas that they turn the other way when Lebanon is being destroyed right next to them. Their neighbours are being murdered, but they only make calculations for their own benefit.

We are giving away the country so a few very rich people can get richer.

War is a barbaric tool of the war profiteers and Empires who employ them. War pits young people from the working class against other similarly poor, or disadvantaged humans, for nothing but the greed of the few. Only we the people can make war obsolete by not participating in the profound crimes of the profiteers and other war mongers.

We know by now that if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands. We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex. . . . This means we must subject the machine - technology - to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

Many on the right confuse the "is" of globalization with the "ought" of simply accepting all its effects. They preach a political quietism that is really just a cloak for greed.

We soon found that the white men were growing rich very fast, and were greedy.

We must subject the machine—technology—to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

Many communities are already devastated by poverty. Increasingly, that poverty is born of the greed of a global trading system.

The agrarian crisis [in India] is an unnecessary tragedy, resulting directly from an economics of greed and a politics driven by the economies of greed.