"Greed Is Good" Quotation
Notwithstanding the popular cultural significance of the character (and the wide repetition of this particular quotation), Gekko never actually uttered the words "Greed is Good" in the original Wall Street film, although the trailers for the film featured a montage of edited scenes that resulted in the phrase being heard as such. The full text of the quotation is below:
| “ | Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A. | ” |
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Famous quotes containing the words greed is, greed and/or quotation:
“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“Who does not know that kings and rulers sprang from men who were ignorant of God, who assumed because of blind greed and intolerable presumption to make themselves masters of other men, their equals, by means of pride, violence, bad faith, murder, and almost every other kind of crime? Surely the devil drove them on.”
—Pope Gregory VII (c. 1020–1085)
“We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, “the italics are ours.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)