MOTIVATING TIPS

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

Stanley Weiser

Verified source: Wall Street, 1987, spoken by Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas)
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Why This Matters

The genius here lies in the deliberate awkwardness—"for lack of a better word"—which signals that Weiser (and screenwriter Oliver Stone) knew exactly how dangerous and incomplete this argument was even as they made it. The line doesn't actually defend greed so much as expose how capitalist rhetoric operates: by asserting truths so baldly that they sound almost reasonable, even when they're morally hollow. Watch how this plays out in boardrooms and startups today, where aggressive self-interest gets repackaged as "ambition" or "disruption," and suddenly the same impulse sounds noble. The quote's real power is as a mirror—it forces us to recognize how easily we accept the unvarnished version when it's dressed up in conviction.

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