"Greed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... central figure of the story, is essentially a self-made man, who has made himself a power to be reckoned with. He is a man of great natural force, immense egotism, insatiable greed for notoriety and unswerving adherence to his own standards of morality. He has two devouring ambitions: First to become one of the inner circle that controls high finance and second to become one ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... come in, took the case in her hand. The Countess had turned her back, but Beatrice caught sight of her face in the cheval glass. It was livid with fury, and all wrinkled up with greed and baffled cupidity. The girl was afraid to trust her voice for a moment. She knew now that unless she had taken this course, the diamonds would not have been hers much longer. A woman who could look like that was capable of anything. ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... weary of all that. Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause:—it is the Gospel of Despair! Man is a Patent-Digester, then: only give him Free Trade, Free digesting-room; and each of us digest what he can come at, leaving the rest to ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... than a quarter of a century has passed since I took that trip to look upon the Rocky Mountains. There was no gold region laying beyond them then, or rather, the enterprise of the Anglo-Saxon had not discovered its existence, and the greed of the white man had not made the trail over the mountains, or through their dismal passes, a familiar way. Along in the afternoon we were visited by a trapper, who had, in his wanderings, discovered the smoke of our camp fires. He was a weather-beaten, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... flesh-pots; turn from filthy greed Of gain that doth the thirsting spirit mock; And heaven shall drop sweet manna for your need, And rain clear rivers from the unhewn rock! Thus saith the Lord!" And Moses—meek, unshod— Within the cloud ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... daughterly love was absent; but she suffered when she thought of the fierce, self-willed old man, cutting himself off from all possible friendships, while his vigor was being sapped daily and hourly by his terrible greed of money. ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... if either violated the neutrality of Belgium, England would co-operate with the other to defend the little State. Should Belgium, he said, "go plump down the maw of another country to satisfy dynastic greed," such a tragedy would "come near to an extinction of public right in Europe, and I do not think we could look on while the sacrifice of freedom and independence was ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... that turns blindly and stumblingly towards joy, towards intervals, towards the mysterious things of the spirit, against all this sordid strenuousness, this driving destructive association of hardfisted peasant soul and Ghetto greed, this fool's "efficiency," that rules ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... of our fellow-passengers, that reaching Henley in the condition of greed and grudge of all travellers on errands of pleasure, we made haste to anticipate any rush for the carriages outside the station which were to take us to the scene of the races. Oddly enough there was no great pressure for these vehicles, or for the more public brakes and ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the death of a man. Then the French canal company started work, and for two or three years did a good deal, until it became evident that the task far exceeded its powers; and then to miscalculation and inefficiency was added the hideous greed of adventurers, trying each to save something from the general wreck, and the company closed with ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... already arrived, and the padrone was occupied in receiving their several contributions. The apartment was a mean one, miserably furnished, but seemed befitting the principal occupant, whose dark face was marked by an expression of greed, and alternately showed satisfaction or disappointment as the contents of the boys' pockets were satisfactory or otherwise. Those who had done badly were set apart ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... view of his object. He turned from the heavy-slumbering men and his eyes fell upon the two small gold chests. Instantly his whole expression changed. Here was the keynote to the man's disposition. Gold! It was the gold he coveted. At all costs that gold was to be his. His eyes shone with greed. He moved towards the boxes as though he were about to handle them; but he paused abruptly before he reached them. The barking of the dogs and the strident tones of the Indian's voice outside arrested him. He suddenly remembered that he had not ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... have fished out from the depths of the Incredible such a colossal manifestation of human folly as that man did. But it may be that I am under-estimating the alacrity of human folly in rising to the bait. No doubt I am. The greed of that absurd monster is incalculable, unfathomable, inconceivable. The career of de Barral demonstrates that it will rise to a naked hook. He didn't lure it with a fairy-tale. He hadn't enough ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... cried out: "Rather than leave her to your greed, I would that I were walled about With death,—and ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... saying, "What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder," surely does not apply to these marriages; for that very admission would be a condemnation of the wisdom of God. He surely never would give his sanction to many of the marriages contracted in a spirit of lust or of greed. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... anyhow. You boys know that." Rutherford hesitated; then his greed dominated. He had them where they had to eat out of his hand. "Give me two thirds, an' you fellows divide the other third ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... mechanical and carnal point of view, no more than a race of minute parasitic animals burrowing in the fair Earth's skin, had better, instead of boasting of our empire over Nature, take care lest we become too troublesome to Nature, by creating, in our haste and greed, too many great black countries, and too many great dirty warrens of houses, miscalled cities, peopled with savages and imps of our own mis-creation; in which case Nature, so far from allowing us to abolish her, will by ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... to her production, which, divided into parts, for two or three days filled a whole page of the paper. I am not aware of any particular service that it did to ethnology; but, as I pointed out in the editorial column, it showed that the people of California were not given over by material greed to the exclusion of intellectual research; and as it was attacked instantly in long communications from one or two scientific men, it thus produced ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... consider for a moment the theory which worked so disastrously for England in 1667; that, namely, of maintaining a sea-war mainly by preying upon the enemy's commerce. This plan, which involves only the maintenance of a few swift cruisers and can be backed by the spirit of greed in a nation, fitting out privateers without direct expense to the State, possesses the specious attractions which economy always presents. The great injury done to the wealth and prosperity of the enemy is also undeniable; and although to some extent his merchant-ships can shelter ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... long as the Romans were morally sound, and incapable of jobbing or scamping their work. The very fact that they united into companies for the purpose of undertaking these contracts shows that they were aware of the risk involved, and wished as far as possible to neutralise it; it did not mean greed for money, but rather anxiety not to lose the ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... propriety of the measure or our ability to pay. These grants are demanded under a claimed right to tax us at pleasure and compel payments by armed force. Your Lordship, it is like the proposition of a highwayman who presents a pistol at the window of your coach and demands enough to satisfy his greed—no specific sum being named—or there ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... civilisation and the beauty of ordered lives that Europeans gave up in going to the new world we gave them opportunity to earn luxury, and, infinitely more important, freedom from the past, that gangrened ghost of the past that is killing Europe to-day with its infection of hate and greed ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... for Imogene Chandler. But it was useless to try to persuade the widow that she was wrong. Back of her own narrowness was Reedy Jenkins. This was Reedy's move; he was using the widow's vanity and personal greed for his own ends; and his ends were the destruction of Rogeen and the capitulation of ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... Perhaps no other field of industry comes so near being common ground for all classes of people. The mineral industry is a field in which it is easy to capitalize not only honest and skillful endeavor, but hopes, guesses, and greed. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that in the popular mind the valuation of a mineral resource is little more than a guess, and sometimes ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... about government. When someone began to recite "eastward the course of Roman Empire, etc., etc.," he hastily left the forum. He just continued to take more and more land because circumstances forced him to do so. He was not driven by ambition or by greed. Both by nature and inclination he was a farmer and wanted to stay at home. But when he was attacked he was obliged to defend himself and when the enemy happened to cross the sea to ask for aid in a distant country then the patient Roman marched many dreary miles to defeat this ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... gay Of shops, the city's comfortable trade, Lookt, and then into months of plodding lookt. And swiftly on my brain there came a wind Of vision; and I saw the road mapt out Along the desert with a chalk of bones; I saw a famine and the Afghan greed Waiting for us, spears at our throats, all we Made women by our hunger; and I saw Gigantic thirst grieving our mouths with dust, Scattering up against our breathing salt Of blown dried dung, till the taste eat like fires Of a wild vinegar into our sheathed marrows; And ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... vices, schisms, quarrelings of the bishops, of their greed for money and preeminence in the last half of the third century. In speaking of the bishops and pastors who had the administration of church government in the year 260, he says: "But some that appeared to be our ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... the business mob That throngs before my cage, And watch their human pulses throb In greed, ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... author's prime purpose was not description, it was to bring out the characters, it was to pillory the Roman aristocracy, it was to amuse! Cicero, in his prosecution of Verres, had shown up this aristocracy in all its brutality and greed, it remained for the author of the Cena to hold its absurdity up to the light of day, to lash an extravagance which, though utterly unbridled, was yet unable to exhaust the looted accumulations of years of political double dealing ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... should beware of them; all this your Majesty may see, if you are so pleased, by the documents, which I send translated into Castilian. But the devil, who seeks his opportunity, furnished these evil men with a king so filled with greed and so overpowered by it that he is almost mad on the subject; and his actions indicate this, for he has had men made of gold and women of silver, and has them at his feasts and gives them drink. He sent to every one ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... are weaving their nets of selfishness and falsehood, and calling them industrial enterprises or political combinations. I can see how the wheels of society are moved by the hidden springs of avarice and greed and rivalry. I can see how children drink in the fables of religion, without understanding them, and how prudent men repeat them without believing them. I can see how the illusions of love appear and vanish, and how men and women swear that their ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... whether of the senses or the mind, is arrested for the moment by what would be overlooked in ordinary moods. The more forceful the current, the more sharp the ripple from any alien substance interposed. A passion that looks forward, like revenge or lust or greed, goes right to its end, and is straightforward in its expression; but a tragic passion, which is in its nature unavailing, like disappointment, regret of the inevitable, or remorse, is reflective, and liable to be continually diverted by the suggestions ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... service of the church, to resist Turks, convert pagans, banish Moslems, and crush Protestants. Yet the very forces engaged in defending the church, the army and the Inquisition, were alien to the Christian life; they were fit embodiments rather of chivalry and greed, or of policy and jealous dominion. The ecclesiastical forces also, theology, ritual, and hierarchy, employed in spreading the gospel were themselves alien to the gospel. An anti-worldly religion ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... were unsealed, and I began to blush for my employment. Here was a sick child, and I sought, in the view of its parents, to remove the medicine-box. Here was the priest of a religion, and I (a heathen millionaire) was corrupting him to sacrilege. Here was a greedy man, torn in twain betwixt greed and conscience; and I sat by and relished, and lustfully renewed his torments. Ave, Caesar! Smothered in a corner, dormant but not dead, we have all the one touch of nature: an infant passion for the sand and blood of the arena. So I brought to an end my first and last experience ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to his legs, and declared to all the world that which he had hitherto kept secret from his own party. It was known afterwards that in discussion with his own dearly-beloved political friend, Lord Cantrip, he had expressed his unbounded anger at the duplicity, greed for power, and want of patriotism displayed by his opponent; but he had acknowledged that the blow had come so quick and so unexpectedly that he thought it better to leave the matter to the House without instruction from himself. He now revelled ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... necessary or endurable that children grow up starved and overworked, that boys and girls be submitted to vicious surroundings, that talent be crushed, that young men and young women be devoured by crime and greed. Youth, its nurturing and developing, has become the passion of the day. This is the meaning of our bureaus of Child Labor, of our Children's Courts, our Houses of Correction, our Fresh-Air Funds and Vacation Homes, our laws regulating ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... he murmured. "If I were sure . . . to pay madame a visit while she sleeps and dreams!" His hand grew tense around the hilt of his sword. "No; let us play Iago rather than Tarquinius; let ambition, rather than love, strike the key-note. Greed was not born to wait. As yet I have robbed no man save at cards; and as every noble cheats when he can, I can do no less. Neither have I struck a man in the back. And I like not this ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... increase of his dominions, when in an evil hour he struck against the growing greatness of Cyrus, and was crushed in the encounter. Had he been less arrogant, the doom he wrought for himself might have been delayed, but it could not have been wholly averted. Nothing could have long withstood the greed of Cyrus for ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... were, under the direction of the consuls, inflamed by the hope of conquest and of the riches that they expected would follow success, and a war which lasted twenty-three years was the result of their reckless greed (B.C. 264). ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... a ship laden with merchandise, the profits to be shared by all. He took it to the kingdom of Siam and ascended the river for thirty leguas, unladed his goods, and disposed of them as well as possible, for they were injured by the water. The Japanese, many of whom live there, tried, in their greed, to attack the Spaniards; but Don Fernando de Silva understood them, and resisted them with his infantry. The Dutch, who have their factory there, notified others near there to come to their aid, in order to attack the ship with its three hundred persons, which is supplied with ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various
... century before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock—the city of Santo Domingo was a rich and populous center of industry and trade. Some of its palaces and churches still remain, massive and splendid; among them, the great cathedral begun in 1514 and finished in 1540." But the Spanish policy of greed and oppression gradually undermined itself. In 1795, when Santo Domingo was ceded to France, it was "abandoned to such a degree that it was a mere wilderness, devoted to the grazing of cattle." Yet, in spite of past tyranny, of neglect, and the knowledge that they ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... command of the sea. Japan would have been put back twenty-five years, there could have been no Russo-Japanese war, and China, instead of being, as she now is, a third-rate Power, might have held the premier position in Asia, as Japan so splendidly and skilfully does now. But, as so often happens, greed and dishonesty, self-seeking and cowardice on the part of high officials, nullified the efforts of the brave seamen who unavailingly gave their lives ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... strength and fresh young pride in her arose in imperative demand for something better in the future. She listened with interest to what George Holt said to her. All her life she had been driven by a man of inflexible will, his very soul inoculated with greed for possessions which would give him power; his body endowed with unfailing strength to meet the demands he made on it, and his heart wholly lacking in sentiment; but she did not propose to start her new life by speaking of her family to strangers. ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... on. Then they would vent their fury and spite on the poor dumb animals. Oh, what cruelty there was! The life of the brute was as nothing; it was the tribute of the trail; it was a sacrifice on the altar of human greed. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... of the narrative, by the composition of the strophe, and by their wit, remind me very forcibly of our English ballads. Let us take the story of St Laurence, written in iambics, in verses of four lines each. In the time of the persecutions of Valerian, the Roman prefect, devoured by greed, summoned St Laurence, the treasurer of the church, before him, and on the plea that parents were making away with their fortunes to the detriment of their children, demanded that the sacred vessels should be given up to him. 'Upon all coins is found the head of the Emperor and not ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... in mock dismay. "This grasping greed for gain is blighting the most promising young men of our avaricious country. Why, it's positively shameful, Bobby, when your father must have left you ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... cut down like grass before the mower. Wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts see the sun of their life's joy go down in blackness, their heaven of love and happiness changed into a hell of misery by somebody's quarrel, somebody's greed and ambition. How many of the common soldiers who make up the great body of the army know or care about the right or wrong of their cause. They go into the fight like dumb-driven cattle, suffer and die and make their loved ones ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... swords will be unsheathed, not in behalf of islanders, or Syracusans, or men of alien stock, as happened in the late war, but of ourselves, suffering under a sense of wrong. And there is another important fact which you ought to realise: this selfish system of organised greed which is Sparta's will fall more readily to pieces than your own late empire. Yours was the proud assertion of naval empire over subjects powerless by sea. Theirs is the selfish sway of a minority asserting dominion over states equally well armed with themselves, and many ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... this wretched work of his had got him worse than ever before—and she blamed his partner for that. She recalled how Nourse had disliked her, she remembered what Amy used to say about the man's worship of business. Yes, with his detestable greed for money, only money, Nourse was doubtless driving Joe. "You're making him just a business man, without a thought or a wish in his head for anything beautiful, really fine, ambition, things he dreamed of and told me about when ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... locking it up in his drawer, glanced the document over, his eyes scintillating with the glare of greed triumphant, he said to himself, "This day's work has doubled the area of my acres, and the number of my niggers. Armstrong's land, his slaves, his houses,— everything he ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... slight noise of the blow had reached Edgar. I heard the springs of the hack creak as he vaulted from it, and the next moment he was towering above me, peering down into the pit. His eyes were wide with excitement, greed, and fear. In his hands he clutched the two suit-cases. Like a lion defending his cubs he glared ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... told a lie, and who won with his sword the freedom of his country. There were lessons on history, in which the tyranny of the English Government was denounced; Kings, Lords and Bishops, especially Bishop Laud, were held up to eternal abhorrence; as was also England's greed of gain, her intolerance, bigotry, taxation; her penal and navigation laws. The glorious War of Independence was related at length. The children of the Puritans, of the Irish and the Germans, did not in those days imbibe much prejudice in favour of England or her institutions, and the English ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... a practicable floor. They soon quiet down; and the spoiler begins to notice her surroundings. The antennae are pointed forwards, enquiringly; the hind-legs are drawn up with a little quiver of greed in the tarsi; the head turns to right and left and follows the evolutions of the Bees against the glass. The miscreant's posture now becomes a striking piece of acting: you can read in it the fierce longings ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... many people of pessimistic disposition say much about greed in American life. One would think to hear them talk that we were a race of misers in this country. To lay too much stress upon the reports of greed in the newspapers would be folly, since their function is to report the unusual and even the ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... with them the thief's ignoble spoil, The beggar's dole, the greed of chiffonnier, The scum of camps, the implements of toil Snatched from dead hands, to rust as useless here; All they could rake or glean from hut or soil Piled their lean ponies, with the jackdaw's greed For vacant glitter. It were scarce a foil To all this tinsel that one feathered ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... "communism" that under such a condition "the incentive of private initiative would disappear" and that no other motive could take its place, is an argument based upon the assumption that human nature derives more inspiration from the idea of dishonourable greed than it derives from the idea of honourable and useful labour; which is an assumption so wholly opposed to true psychology that it has only to be nakedly stated to be seen in ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... maidens and women folk from the evils of drink, greed and outrages resulting from indefensible pass laws and the elimination of bad habits among men by a rightful policy will restore that efficiency, loyalty, and contentment which aforetime were the boast of pioneer administrators in British South Africa, and which ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... of holy men like St. Bernard, in the acts of the councils, in the satirical poems of the popular troubadours and the sprightly versifiers of the courts.[149] All agree in denouncing the iniquity of the clergy, their greed, and their reckless disregard of their sacred duties. St. Bernard sadly asks, "Whom can you show me among the prelates who does not seek rather to empty the pockets of his flock than to subdue ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... might now have made her resentful or at least critical. She saw him as a figure most disastrously misunderstood. Without any sentimentality in her vision she saw him lonely, proud, reserved, longing for her sympathy which she denied him. His greed for money she saw suddenly as a determination that his daughter should not be left in want. All those years he had striven and his apparent harshness, sharpness, unkindness had been that he might ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... many, said it was unprofessional, sensational, a "bid for popularity." Those whom he helped knew these insinuations to be untrue. His sympathy was too sincere, the assistance too gladly given. But misunderstood or not, he persevered. The wrongs of many an ignorant working man suffering through the greed of those over him, were righted. Those who robbed the poor under various guises were made to feel the hand of the law. And for none of these cases did he ever ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... custom and monogamy a law." It is the wife as well as the prostitute who is degraded by a system which makes venal love possible. "The time has gone past," the same writer remarks elsewhere (p. 195) "when a mere ceremony can really sanctify what is base and transform lust and greed into the sincerity of sexual affection. If, to enter into sexual connections with a man for a solely material end is a disgrace to humanity, it is a disgrace under the marriage bond just as much as apart from the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... money dwindled to a few shillings. A sudden cessation of the sound of the feeding of pigs caught him from his mournful reflections. He looked up quickly, to see Mr. Biggleswade staring at his newspaper with a most striking expression of triumphant greed. ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... came from clashing trees and from lightning. The story of Hylas (I. 43) probably reminded Varus of Siro's lecture on images and reflection, Pasiphae (I. 46) of unruly passions, explained perhaps as in Lucretius' fourth book, Atalanta (I. 61) of greed, and Phaeton of ambition. As for Scylla, Vergil had himself in the Ciris (I. 69) mentioned, only to reject, the allegorical interpretation here presented, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... to-day, good Malluch, Sheik Ilderim appeared to be a very common man. The rabbis in Jerusalem would look down upon him, I fear, as a son of a dog of Edom. How came he in possession of the Orchard? And how has he been able to hold it against the greed of Roman governors?" ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... I've had to resist and to attack sometimes—that's only one way of resisting—without counting the exact cost, according to the demands of such sort of life as I had blundered into. I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men—men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... mother," Cuthbert said, "that when ambition and greed are in one scale, reverence for the holy church will not weigh much in the other. Had King Richard been killed upon his way home, or so long as nothing was heard of him, Sir Rudolph might have been content ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... a veritable tower of greed and egotism. The Marnys were rich and the little Vicomte very young, and just now the brightly-plumaged hawk was busy plucking the latest pigeon, newly arrived ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... that time. What more could she say than what he already knew? Many agencies other than hers kept him informed of the state of affairs in Livonia. A bitter thought, this, for it showed Karl actuated by love of Hedwig, and not by greed of power. She feared that more ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... principal station in Connecticut. They had made, in all, some twenty converts among the Indians, and had reclaimed several of their chief men from drunkenness and idleness. Moravian principles forbade these missionaries to take an oath. Consequently, the greed of traders, the rivalry of creeds, together with the belief that there was something wrong about men who would not swear allegiance to King George,—notwithstanding their willingness to affirm it, and notwithstanding their denial of the Pretender,—gave rise to the conviction that ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... very weak. Today a gleam of hope. Canaris, after many trials, caught a fish a foot long. We devoured it raw with the utmost greed. Our ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... the world for, but to do the impossible in the strength of God?" The rich man and the poor man, the employer and the laborer, must find some common ground of justice and harmony. The nation must be steered away from commercial greed and military glory, toward international arbitration, toward peace, toward universal brotherhood. Knowledge and faith are to join hands, and the human spirit is to reach nobler heights. These are the tasks which we Americans are to ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... in work would probably promote marriage of able and ambitious young people. Walter Gallichan complains that "we do not even recognize love as a finer passion than money greed. It is a kind of luxury, or pleasant pastime, for the sentimentally minded. Love is so undervalued as a source of happiness, a means of grace, and a completion of being, that many men would sooner work to keep a motor car ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... was closely in keeping with the greed of Monsieur Rigaud at breakfast. His avaricious manner of collecting all the eatables about him, and devouring some with his eyes while devouring others with his jaws, was the same manner. His utter ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... humiliated, hating her for her meanness, demoralized by his idleness and despair, he begins to abuse her. The story becomes a careful and painful study of the disintegration of this union, a penetrating and searching analysis of the degeneration of these two souls, the woman's corroded by greed, the man's ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... who had done them most good; it was their benefactors they treated the most savagely. And then, too, the usual vices of every community, the love of loot, the thirst for vengeance, blind fury, anger of heart, low greed, were so many additional predisposing causes of the horrors ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... this 10-ton slaver was not the limit. Mr. Spears finds that open rowboats, no more than 24 feet long by 7 wide, landed as many as 35 children in Brazil out of say 50 with which the voyage began. But the size of the vessels made little difference in the comfort of the slaves. Greed packed the great ones equally with the small. The blacks, stowed in rows between decks, the roof barely 3 feet 10 inches above the floor on which they lay side by side, sometimes in "spoon-fashion" with from 10 to 16 inches surface-room for each, endured ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... boy," returned his father. "The stone is worth a large fortune, and the greed of a man like U Saw for a precious stone is beyond your understanding, for you do not know ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... Wemyss's estate, by which they were to cycle for some miles. She pointed out how its perfect taste and avoidance of red brick and its hoggish swallowing of tracts of pleasant land symbolised the specious charm and the thieving greed which were well known to be the attributes of the aristocracy. Rachael was wonderful. She was an Atheist, too. When she was twelve she had decided to do without God for a year, and it had worked. Ellen had not got ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... words of the clause conferring jurisdiction upon officers, in the old forms of judicial commissions. This name is fact, not fancy.] Smith. This son was educated with care—the shrewd father feeling his own need—but was early instilled with his father's greed for gain, and the necessity for unusual exertion if he would achieve equal position with the old families who ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... arrival platform of one of our vast termini was unoccupied save for the solitary figure of a young and beautiful girl, who, clad in a thin but still graceful costume, crouched shivering over the morsel of fire which the greed of a great company alone permitted to its passengers. Outside resounded the roar and shriek of trains, the ceaseless ebb and flow of the human tide which beats for ever on the shores of modern Babylon. Enid Anstruther gazed sadly into the embers. She had come to the end ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... the peppermint to Melchisedek who bolted it with an ill-advised greed that brought the tears to his eyes, for the peppermint was a ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... the governor, was a frequent object of attack. He seems to have been of an irritable temper, aggravated perhaps by an old unhealed wound in the cheek, which gave him constant annoyance. One writer declares that Acadia languishes under selfish greed and petty tyranny; that everything was hoped from Brouillan when he first came, but that hope has changed to despair; that he abuses the King's authority to make money, sells wine and brandy at retail, quarrels with officers ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... about "reconstruction," as it was called; and I was anxious to preserve good feeling on his part toward the President. In the light of subsequent events, it is curious to recall the fact that he complained of Stanton's retention in the Cabinet, because the latter's greed of power prevented the Commander-in-Chief of the army from controlling the most minute details without interference. I urged this on the President as an additional motive for dismissing his War Secretary and replacing ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... Ablewhite never made his appearance that night. But I knew the importance which his worldly greed attached to his son's marriage with Miss Verinder—and I felt a positive conviction (do what Mr. Godfrey might to prevent it) that we should see him the next day. With his interference in the matter, the storm on which I had counted would certainly come, and the salutary exhaustion ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... Little wrought she upon that Holy One Who with his calm eyes dumbed her bitter lips And made her black snakes writhe to hide their fangs. Then followed Ruparaga—Lust of days— That sensual Sin which out of greed for life Forgets to live; and next him Lust of Fame, Nobler Aruparaga, she whose spell Beguiles the wise, mother of daring deeds, Battles and toils. And haughty Mano came, The Fiend of Pride; and smooth Self-Righteousness. Uddhachcha; and—with ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... design was to loot an empire and proclaim the Holy Gospel of Christ as the Spanish people had received the same. I have no doubt at all that the desire to propagate their religion was quite as real and as vividly present to them at all times as was their greed for gold. They had a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge; like the men of the Middle Ages who bore the cross on their hauberks, every Spaniard was a crusader. Aside from De Soto, there is no single character of all those, ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... to them. It was new to Napoleon, who had so frequently been met halfway, who knew that men for greed will part smilingly with half in order to save the residue. He knew that many, rather than help a neighbour who is in danger by a robber, will join the robber and share the spoil, crying out that force majeure ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... Big Tom, who never made visitors welcome, and never wasted kerosene, actually lifted down the lamp and lighted it, and would not hear of One-Eye's taking an early departure. The cowboy's importance was making him welcome; also, his gifts. For greed was the keynote of Barber's character. The latter haw-hawed at everything One-Eye said. And Johnnie gazed in amazement at the unusual spectacle of Big ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... he had seen in his rambles through France crossed Rousseau's pastoral visions, and he admitted that there were some lands in which the publican devours the fruits of the earth; where the misery that covers the fields, the bitter greed of some grasping farmer, the inflexible rigour of an inhuman master, take something from the charm of his rural scenes. "Worn-out horses ready to expire under the blows they receive, wretched peasants attenuated by hunger, broken by weariness, clad in rags, hamlets all in ruins—these ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... In the thirty-fourth chapter Ezekiel deals with the same theme under a different figure. First he traces the cause of the exile to the inefficiency and greed and oppression of the earlier shepherds, the rulers like Jehoiakim, who had scattered rather than gathered and led the people intrusted to them. Now Jehovah himself, the great Shepherd of the People, will arise and gather his ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... The greed of man for gain has smothered and will ever smother the human conscience. The slave trade, under the denunciation of piracy, still exists, and will exist until African slavery ceases throughout the world. So long as there is a demand, at good ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... was made to deduce anything from them. But for my part, if I wanted specially reliable evidence as to any matter of fact, it is precisely from such a being that I would seek it. Let me draw you a picture of that class of intellect. They have a greed for information, but the information, to satisfy them, must relate to actualities; they have no sympathy with fiction; it is from their impatience of what seems to be that springs their curiosity of what is. Clio is their muse, and she alone. Their whole lust ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... danger," he said, "which we have to face: that these foul pests of society should escape with Professor Caldegard's discovery and master his secret—a peril to which all the dangers mankind has run since the world began from greed, bigotry, alcohol and opium are child's play. The bill of which Sir Gregory has just spoken would give us powers to lay hands on all these local branches of what Superintendent Finucane has described as 'the ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... to the days of my youth, those merry days of California before the gold was about her dear form like prisoner's chains; before the greed of the States and England had forced us into the weary drudgery of the earth, and made us the ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... against this dangerous greed for wealth and the unscrupulousness and ruthlessness which it engenders, it is no part of my present object to warn any young man. I take it that the negative standards of private conduct are usually not much affected by a man's choice of a pursuit in life. If any man's honor could be ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... the people and giving them opportunities for earning money from the State, but in spite of this, many of the lower classes whose favour he especially strove to obtain, became disgusted with, his greed and insolence, and preferred to attach themselves to Nikias. Indeed, there was nothing harsh or overbearing in the pride of Nikias, which arose chiefly from his fear of being thought to be currying favour with ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... of his masters and the follies to which those faults were leading. The Company had blundered very badly before the coming of Clive; had blundered through false security, through negligence, through pusillanimity, through greed. After the victories of Clive had placed the Board in Leadenhall Street, and its representatives in India, on a very different footing, the Company blundered through rapacity, through selfishness, through the arrogance born of an unforeseen ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... wealth which the tomb contains, and in the evening the discovery is discussed by the women at the well where the water is drawn for the village, with the result that it very soon assumes prodigious proportions, inflaming the minds of all men with the greed of gold. Visitors often ask why it is that the mummies of the Pharaohs are not left to lie each in its own tomb; and it is argued that they look neither congruous nor dignified in the glass cases of the museum. The answer is obvious to ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... in the wings of the Tower draw their inspiration from the days of the conquistadors. Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney's Fountain of El Dorado is a dramatic representation of the Aztec myth of The Gilded One, which the followers of Cortez, in their greed for gold, mistook for a fact instead of a fable. (p. 54.) The Fountain of Youth by Edith Woodman Burroughs finds its justification as a part of the historical significance of the Tower in the legend of that Fountain of Eternal Youth sought by Ponce de Leon. (p. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... cold-blooded premeditation; the cynical indifference to the result of your atrocities, combined with the delight with which you have wallowed in human gore; your contempt for all the dictates of honesty, truth, pity, and good faith; your greed, ingratitude, treachery, savageness, meanness, and cannibalism; all these things stamp you as the most atrocious, unmitigated and loathsome scoundrel, savage, monster, and vampire that ever wallowed in the foul and fathomless quagmire of infinite ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the pretext of suppressing the vast organization of the White Nile slave-trade. It was freely stated that an Englishman was placed in command because an Egyptian could not be relied upon to succeed, but that the greed of new territory was the actual and sole object of the expedition, and that the slave-trade would reappear in stupendous activity when the English personal influence should be withdrawn. Such unsympathetic expressions must have been a poor reward to the ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... many, and she closed up behind him for a guard, grasping more firmly the shaft of her short, serviceable spear. She saw the broad, black, scowling visage of young Mawg, towering over a little group of his kinsfolk, and eyeing her with mingled greed and rage, and she divined at once that he was at the back of whatever mischief might be brewing. She answered his look with one of mocking scorn, and then turned her attention to the Chief, who was sitting in grim silence, the customary ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... go to the root of the moral disease of Rehoboth. If it were drink, or profligacy, or greed, I might; but self-righteousness beat Jesus, and no wonder it ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... desire] — N. covetousness, ravenousness &c. adj.; venality, avidity, cupidity; acquisitiveness (acquisition) 775; desire &c. 865. [greed for money or material things] greed, greediness, avarice, avidity, rapacity, extortion. selfishness &c.943; auri sacra fames[Lat]. grasping, craving, canine appetite, rapacity. V. covet, crave (desire) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... his heels, and his crooked hands all dark with the dusty earth clutched at the stones beside him. He remained thus a long time, staring at the empty hole. Then caution, which was even stronger in his nature than greed, brought him to himself. His thin face was grey and haggard as he carefully swept the earth back to its place, removing all traces of what he had done. Then he knew how foolish he had been to let Zorzi know what he had partly ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... liked and avoidance of what is disliked) strives and begins acts that involve much labour. One endeavours one's best for repeatedly enjoying those forms and scents (and the three other objects of the remaining three senses) that appear very agreeable. Gradually, attachment, and aversion, and greed, and errors of judgment arise. The mind of one overwhelmed by greed and error and affected by attachment and aversion is never directed to virtue. One then begins with hypocrisy to do acts that are good. Indeed, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Possessed of inordinate greed, the monk had a mania for amassing wealth, yet what really became of his money was to me always a mystery. Though he would have a balance of a million or so roubles at his bank to-day, yet the day after to-morrow his pass-book showed ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... having heard rumors of a wonderful tree which, in some unknown land, yielded golden apples, was moved with great greed to have some of this remarkable fruit. Hence he commanded Hercules to make the quest of this tree his eleventh labor. The hero had no notion where the tree grew, but he was bound by his bond to obey the King, so he set out and after a time reached the kingdom of Atlas, King of Africa. He ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... dying Charles of Spain was infuriated by this conspiracy to break up and divide his dominion. His jealousy of France would have led him to select the Austrian claimant; but the emperor's undisguised greed for a portion of the Spanish empire, and the overbearing and unpleasant manner of the Austrian ambassador in the Spanish court, drove him to listen to the overtures of Louis, who had a powerful ally in Cardinal ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... will do as much evil as luck allows him. Though he has got Baddeby, Norman was covetous of Avalcomb. When his lord, Edric Jarl, was still King Edmund's man, he twice beset the castle, and my father twice held it against him. And his greed was such that he could not stay away even after Edric had become the ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... what he felt at the moment was not the humour of the situation. To be the very first and solitary arrival is nowhere esteemed the happiest fortune, but in Elgin a kind of ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed for the entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A young man of Elgin would walk up and down in the snow for a quarter of an hour with the thermometer at zero to escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would have so walked. ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan |
