Quotes About Self-interest

While claiming advocacy, what hoaxers really exhibit is self-interest. Often, this is because there is only the self to support their false claims; any revelations merely provide further opportunities for details and forgery.

Im quite self-serving so, while going round a degree show, what I really want to find out is whats going on in the world today, particularly as technology has widened the chasm between generations.

What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one.

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

An elite is someone who's for themselves and not for the country.

Men's most superficial feelings lead them to prefer cruel laws. Nevertheless, when they are subjected to them themselves, it is in each man's interest that they be moderate, because the fear of being injured is greater than the desire to injure.

I don't see myself as a hero because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.

Mitt Romney's only bottom line is the one at the end of his own bank statement. The problem is that he confuses his own narrow, self-interest - and that of people like him - with the national interest. He thinks as long as we do right by the Mitt Romneys of the world, America will be just fine.

Nothing that is devoid of justice can be honorable. It was well said by Plato: "Not only is knowledge, when divorced from justice, to be termed subtlety rather than wisdom; but also the soul prompt to encounter danger, if moved thereto by self-interest, and not by the common good, should have the reputation of audacity rather than of courage.

Everyone likes to think they are doing good while at the same time pocketing a bag of cash

Indeed? Well, I shall bring you presents so long as it pleases me and so long as I see things that will enhance your charms. I shall bring you dark-green watered silk for a frock to match the bonnet. And I warn you that I am not kind. I am tempting you with bonnets and bangles and leading you into a pit. Always remember I never do anything without reason and I never give anything without expecting something in return. I always get paid.

Mercenary? No, I'm only farsighted. Though perhaps that is merely a synonym for mercenary. At least, people who were not as farsighted as I will call it that.

I learned a long time ago in Hollywood that the only person I should vote for is myself.

What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.

De Mortimer was willing to wager his hopes for salvation that self-interest was the one drink no man refused, but he had never understood why most men must sweeten it so lavishly ere they could swallow it.

The instinct for profit, thought Jela—personal profit. That instinct was maybe not a long-term survival trait.

it is selfish," he says, "because you get more out of it than what you are putting into

In his experience, when a person suggested that someone needed to be elected leader, they often had themselves in mind for the position.

I know on which side my bread is buttered.

Yet those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that ensures it, live a half-life, having indulged their self-interest at the cost of their self-respect…. Sacrifice for a cause greater than your self-interest, and you invest your lives with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect assured.

Society was self-interest given a pretty gloss.

As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

Everyone, she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves.