“Oh, cool. You're actually hollow. The name's Greed. I wanna be your friend.”
Greed Quotes
3 quotes from Fullmetal Alchemist, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The homunculus who wants everything, and who turns out to mean it broadly enough to include company. Two centuries old, manufactured twice, and the only one of the seven who defects.
“You humans think that greed is just for money and power, but everybody wants something they don't have.”
The homunculus scheme only holds together if the sins are recognisable. Seven of them are extracted from one man and set loose as people, so each has to be an ordinary appetite scaled up rather than an exotic one, and this is the definition that does the load-bearing work. Defined this broadly, avarice stops being a vice and becomes the plain condition of wanting, which is what lets the series put its greediest character in the sympathetic column without rewriting him.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Yeah, you're right. This is what I wanted. I wanted the chance to have friends like these.”
Two centuries of demanding money, women and power, settled in one concession that costs him the argument he has been having since Dublith. It is earned rather than announced: the series first made him spend a whole arc with a crew that would not obey him and did not leave, and the admission is the bill for that. Nothing about the wanting was wrong, only his estimate of what he was wanting.
Read Greed's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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Villains in this genre are introduced with a speech. Greed gets an inspection and a job offer, delivered to a boy in a suit of armour who has spent the series being treated as either a tragedy or a weapon. The homunculus in the Dublith basement is the first character to find Alphonse's condition interesting rather than pitiable, and that is not a lapse in menace. Wanting everything includes wanting company, which is why he is the one of the seven who eventually defects.