Quotes About Self-interest

No one likes to be confronted with the truth about what they will do when motivated by fear. But its only human to act in our own self-interest. The slop is a slippery one, an abyss below. It gets away from you, that morality you cling to when things are going well. Its when the bottom falls out of your life that you really see who you are.

In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired.

With the Neutrality Proclamation, Hamilton continued to define his views on American foreign policy: that it should be based on self-interest, not emotional attachment; that the supposed altruism of nations often masked baser motives; that individuals sometimes acted benevolently, but nations seldom did. This austere, hardheaded view of human affairs likely dated to Hamilton's earliest observations of the European powers in the West Indies.

These men, often elevated to the status of local heroes, served as the most violently effective tool of a democracy aroused against Native Americans: citizen-soldiers engaged in acts of self-interest disguised as self-preservation.

I know that this is sport first and business second, and people have to do what's right for them.

Patriotism is most often nothing more but an extension of individual egoism

The poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which controls it, and his egotism is no less blind than his devotedness was formerly.

Self-interest usually governed political loyalties.

Ashoka supplemented this general moral and political principle by a dialectical argument based on enlightened self-interest: 'For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect.

When men spoke of changing the world, they always meant to suit their own interests.

And loyalty? A trick those with power played on those without to make them act against their own interests.

Never trust a man beyond his own interests.

Men can have all manner of deeply held beliefs about the world in general that they find most inconvenient when called upon to apply to their own lives. Few people let morality get in the way of expediency. Or even convenience. A man who truly believes in a thing beyond the point where it costs him is a rare and dangerous thing." "It's

I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.

All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.

The new world of communication is a blessing for the citizens of the world trained to think critically and knowledgeable about history. But what about citizens who have been seduced by the world of life as entertainment and commerce? They have been educated, in good part, by a world in which negative emotional provocation is the rule rather than the exception and where the best solutions for a problem have to do primarily with short-term self-interests. Can they really be blamed?

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name a person or nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.

I actually think that self-interest is overrated as an all-purpose guide to political motive. It leaves out something at least as powerful and immovable - individual psychology.

If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy, and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed.

Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.

The American middle class used to be envy of the world. It was a byproduct of economic freedom. We had a very dynamic free-market economy and limited government. People were out there pursuing their own self-interest and creating employment opportunities.

Zuchek, a patient, steel-nerved negotiator, utterly devoted to Russia's self-interest, vs. Hollenbach, whose once brilliant mind now was obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child's with the toy blocks of destiny.