kill the goose that lays the golden eggs

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Idioms and Phrases

Destroy a source of riches through stupidity or greed, as in If he never gives his loyal customers a break on some items in his store, he'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs . This expression, already a proverb in the late 1400s, alludes to Aesop's fable about a farmer whose goose lays one golden egg a day, and who kills the goose in the mistaken belief that he'll get all the eggs at once.

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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