"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
Herman Melville. Moby Dick
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we hurl away any trash towards which we seem to have been suspected of mean cupidity.
George Eliot. Middlemarch
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These people hated me with the hatred of cupidity and disappointment.
Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)
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he knew better than anyone else how entirely personal the value of this letter was, and saw nothing in it likely to tempt cupidity. The fact was that none of his servants, none of the travelers present, could have gained anything by being possessed of this paper.