A healthy desire for wealth is not greed. It’s a desire for life.
If we weren’t born with anti-social passions – narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious – why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?
Why are we in this mess, now facing the prospect of economic armageddon? It’s because the prevailing characteristic has been greed, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s individuals living beyond their means or governments living beyond their means or people seeking to get rich quick.
The only thing that stands between corporate greed and poverty is the union.
It’s impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands.
It’s not in my mission to work against Euroskepticism; it’s my mission to work for fair markets. In antitrust, what is at stake is, in some ways, as old as Adam and Eve because it is about greed, to get more.
People always ask me for my secret. There isn’t one. You’ve just got to keep a level head and stay away from greed, which is the worst thing that can happen to a successful person.
We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn’t come this far by letting the special interests run wild. We didn’t do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell.
The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased.
To those supporters who were told that I abandoned them, that is untrue. I abandoned greed, corruption, and compromise, never you, and never the artistic gifts and abilities that sustained me.
People talk about Wall Street greed, but one of the things many people don’t understand is that there are a lot of organizations that have been the recipient of largess from the same Wall Street.
Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.
The most satisfying thrillers send ordinary people into battle against the forces of evil – otherwise known as greed, ego, rage, fear and laziness – and bring them out bloodied but whole.
They have stolen the public lands. They have grasped all to themselves, and by their unprincipled greed brought a crisis of unparalleled distress on forty millions of people, who have natural resources to feed, clothe and shelter the whole human race.
We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.
Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.
The hypocrisy of some is that we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and evolved, but we’re still also driven by primal urges like greed and power.
We have to knock down the barriers erected by greed, special interests, powerful forces.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it – their shareholders would revolt at anything less.
We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions.
The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues – probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life – even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.
