Instead of this we have luxury and avarice; public indigence side by side with private opulence; we glorify wealth and pursue idleness; between the worthy and the unworthy we make no distinction; all the prizes of virtue are awarded to ambition.
We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.
History seems to us an arena of instincts and fashions, of appetite, avarice, and craving for power, of blood lust, violence, destruction, and wars, of ambitious ministers, venal generals, bombarded cities, and we too easily forget that this is only one of its many aspects.
Avarice, the spur of industry, is so obstinate a passion, and works its way through so many real dangers and difficulties, that it is not likely to be scared by an imaginary danger, which is so small that it scarcely admits of calculation.
Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.
We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.
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.
By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
It is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief.
Enriched beyond the dreams of any normal person?s avarice, she accumulated possessions with a single-minded lust that calls to mind those ancient Romans who gorged themselves, then vomited so they could gorge again.