Amelia > Amelia's Quotes

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#1

“Greed, envy, sloth, pride and gluttony: these are not vices anymore. No, these are marketing tools. Lust is our way of life. Envy is just a nudge towards another sale. Even in our relationships we consume each other, each of us looking for what we can get out of the other. Our appetites are often satisfied at the expense of those around us. In a dog-eat-dog world we lose part of our humanity.”
― Jon Foreman

tags: envy, foreman, greed, jon-foreman, lust, pride, sloth, switchfoot

238 likes

#2

“So the unwanting soul
sees what's hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.”
― Lao Tzu

tags: greed, soul

285 likes

#3

“Most of the mess that is called history comes about because kings and presidents cannot be satisfied with a nice chicken and a good loaf of bread.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

tags: greed, history, kings, presidents, revolution

116 likes

#4

“We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.”
― Franklin Delano Roosevelt

tags: economics, greed

107 likes

#5

“You have succeeded in life when all you really WANT is only what you really NEED.”
― Vernon Howard

tags: greed, life, success

102 likes

#6

“The Master said, “If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.”
― Confucius

tags: capitalism, consumerism, greed, materialism, profit

145 likes

#7

“Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough.”
― Janwillem van de Wetering

tags: greed

90 likes

#8

“I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

tags: curiosity, greed, insight, understanding

351 likes

#9

“Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.”
― Philip Slater

tags: capitalism, commercialism, economy, endless-circles, failed-systems, greed, materialism, pursuit-of-loneliness, stuff-things

166 likes

#10

“What win I, if I gain the thing I seek?
A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.
Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week?
Or sells eternity to get a toy?
For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy?
Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown,
Would with the sceptre straight be strucken down?”
― William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

tags: destruction, fleeting-possession, gain, greed

162 likes

#12

“Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.

Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.

They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.”
― Henry Wallace

tags: big-business, fascism, greed, patriotism, politics, wealth

85 likes

#13

“If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States.”
― Henry Wallace

tags: fascism, greed, money, politics, power

102 likes

#14

“The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

~quoted in the New York Times, April 9, 1944”
― Henry A. Wallace

tags: facism

119 likes

#15

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

tags: capitalism, class, failed-systems, greed

280 likes

#16

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

tags: action, attitude, choice, imagination, inspiration, life, pretend

18015 likes

#17

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
― Elizabeth Warren

tags: capitalism, greed, responsibility, socialism

521 likes

#18

“We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."

[ The Berlin Crisis: Radio and Television Address to the American People (The White House, July 25, 1961)]”
― John F. Kennedy

tags: double-standards, egotism, greed, negotiation

133 likes

#19

“It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

tags: avarice, catholic-author, common-sense, curiosity, deadly-sins, faults, gadfly, gold, greed, greediness, greedy-people, human-nature, mammon, proverbs, riches, sad-but-true, wisdom, wise-sayings

88 likes

#20

“If I have to build a big company by mistreating other people then the Bible says WOE to me. I don't know what that is, but I don't want any of it.”
― Joyce Meyer

tags: greed

29 likes

#21

“There are 6 reasons that a person does anything: Love, faith, greed, boredom, fear... revenge.”
― Ally Carter, Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover

tags: boredom, faith, fear, greed, love, revenge

39 likes

#22

“Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.”
― Gore Vidal

tags: ayn-rand, evil, greed, objectivism

180 likes

#23

“The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others”
― Iain M. Banks, Complicity

tags: complicity, dystopia, greed, indictment, morality, nihilistic

140 likes

#24

“I'm fat because I'm greedy, and if my mind is fat it's because I'm curious.”
― Stephen Fry

tags: curiosity, greed, knowledge

55 likes

#25

“he who is greedy is always in want”
― Horace

tags: contentment, greed, satisfaction, wisdom

66 likes

#26

“[I]t was with a good end in mind – that of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil – that Eve allowed herself to be carried away and eat the forbidden fruit. But Adam was not moved by this desire for knowledge, but simply by greed: he ate it because he heard Eve say it tasted good.”
― Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men

tags: adam-and-eve, good-and-evil, greed, knowledge, motivation, original-sin, vice

47 likes

#27

“Fraud is the daughter of greed.”
― Jonathan Gash, The Great California Game

tags: antiques, fraud, greed, lovejoy

37 likes

#28

“These are the four that are never content: that have never been filled since the dew began-
Jacala's mouth, and the glut of the kite, and the hands of the ape, and the eyes of Man.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books

tags: ape, crocodile, curiosity, greed, kite

44 likes

#30

“Those who try to juggle wisdom, power and greed, drop one of the balls, every time.”
—Zarost”
― Greg Hamerton, The Riddler's Gift

tags: fantasy-books, fantasy-fiction, greed, power, wisdom

29 likes

#31

“There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words 'I devise and bequeath.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

tags: greed, wills

33 likes

#32

“The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.”
― George Monbiot

tags: economy, energy, environment, greed, oil

30 likes

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