1,220 Quotes About Greed

When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

No value system formed by man will ever manage the men who formed it.

Nearly all large healthcare organizations make their top executives extremely rich, a perverse incentive to profit off the sick.

To simply emote is not to express an opinion. Rather, it is an attempt to force a point of view that won’t stand on its own merits.

It seems that we are indiscriminately committed to force-fitting a moral standard to the selfishness of our agendas as a means of hiding the selfishness of our agendas. Yet, the only thing that’s hidden is the fact that nothing is hidden.

In any culture where agendas have shaped ethics, we will find a culture that has in fact purged itself of ethics. And that means that in time there will be no culture.

We evolved haphazardly within a random universe; no purpose underpins us, no God watches over us, and no assured glorious future awaits us. We are saddled with a dualistic consciousness that weighs us down and plays tricks on us. We have built and seem unable to dismantle a dehumanizing and destructive civilization and mindset that perpetuates deceit and greed. We can make ourselves as comfortable as possible, as doctors tell their terminally ill patients, but we are sadly incurable.

[Conventional wisdom] very heavily tends to reflect the preferences and the interests of the elite.

For whom, I asked myself innocently, were the riches and dominions that the English conquered and held on to at any price in the most remote corners of the planet? The neighborhoods which succeeded one another interminably down the narrow cobbled streets were not inhabited by the beneficiaries of those enterprises.