Quotes on Avarice

The decay of old aristocratic prejudices against greedy speculation, the undermining of orthodox Christian faith (which forbids avarice)... the debauching of agriculture to a gross money-getting concern: these particular aspects of a vast and voracious concentration upon profits are so many illustrations of our sinning confusion of values.

The avarice person is ever in want; let your desired aim have a fixed limit.

All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.

If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.

Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more.

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people... it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

All earthly joy begins pleasantly, but at the end it gnaws and kills.

Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.

It is strange people should be so greedy, when they are alone in the world.

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that /needs/ no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all... why then perhaps we /must/ stand fast a little --even at the risk of being heroes.

Instant gratification takes too long.

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have all one wants.

Poverty wants much; but avarice, everything.

Strikes deeper, grows with more pernicious root.

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.

Scenes are now to take place as will open the eyes of credulity and of insanity itself, to the dangers of a paper medium abandoned to the discretion of avarice and of swindlers.

So for a good old-gentlemanly vice, I think I must take up with avarice.

What is at the heart of all national problems? It is that we have seen the hand of material interest sometimes about to close upon our dearest rights and possessions.

In plain Truth, it is no Want, but rather Abundance that creates Avarice.