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Financial Quotes
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Greed Quotes

  • "My father said: You must never try to make all the money that's in a deal. Let the other fellow make some money too, because if you have a reputation for always making all the money … you won’t make many deals."
    J. Paul Getty (1892–1976), US entrepreneur, oil industry executive, and financier
    Referring to his father, George Franklin Getty, who was also a successful oil business executive.
    Source: Quoted in Getty on Getty (Somerset de Chair, 1989), ch. 2
  • "Greed is even more contagious than fear."
    Bud Hadfield (1923–), US entrepreneur and founder of Kwik Kopy
    Source: Wealth within Reach: Winning Strategies for Success from the Unconventional Wisdom of Bud Hadfield (1995)
  • "What kind of society isn’t structured on greed?"
    Milton Friedman (1912–2006), US economist and winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics
    Source: There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (1975)
  • "Nothing defines human beings better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs."
    Scott Adams (1957–), US cartoonist and humorist
    Source: The Dilbert Principle (1996)
  • "The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable."
    Warren Buffett (1930–), US entrepreneur and financier
    Source: Channels (1986)
  • "Greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works."
    Oliver Stone (1946–), US director and screenwriter
    From the film satirizing some of the excesses of the 1980s.
    Source: Wall Street (1987)
  • "Laissez-faire, supply and demand—one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egotism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause—it is the gospel of despair."
    Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), British historian and essayist
    Source: Past and Present (1843)
  • "If you take the greed out of Wall Street, you're left with pavement."
    Anonymous
    Source: Remark (Fall 2008)
  • "It was the kind of blind, gulping, insensate greed that you associate with some milk-eyed creature in a volcanic fissure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench—an organism with no understanding of the existence, let alone the feelings, of other members of the ecosystem."
    Boris Johnson (1964–), British mayor of London
    On Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief executive of RBS.
    Source: Daily Telegraph (London) (March 3, 2009)
  • "For top executives to award themselves these kinds of compensation packages in the midst of this economic crisis is not only bad taste, it's bad strategy—and I will not tolerate it as president."
    Barack Obama (1961–), US president
    Source: Press conference (February 4, 2009)

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