Quotes About Self-interest

Comey made mistakes, but they weren't made out of self-interest. To deny he wasn't put into political positions by lawmakers on Capitol Hill or on the campaign trail would be placing blame in the wrong place.

As the spiritual leader of six million people, the Dalai Lama can be credited with a significant renunciation of the authority of tradition - of the conventional politics of national self-interest as well as of religion.

Public crowdfunding still suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem. Everyone will want the benefit of the crowdfunded efforts but is incentivized to sit on the sidelines and hope others chip in.

I don't think we're going to save anything if we go around talking about saving plants and animals only; we've got to translate that into what's in it for us.

Word: I'm not saying the races don't have a common human bond. I'm just saying that bond isn't about compassion and equality and tolerance. What we all share together is the drive to get what's ours and keep it for as long as we can.

We need to make a very clear distinction between what is in our ego's self-interest and what is in our ultimate interest; it is from mistaking one for the other that all our suffering comes.

what is in our ego's self-interest and what is in our ultimate interest;

The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.

I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.

Many people feel most alive, most fulfilled, when they violate the dictates of conscience or even the promptings of their own self interest.

Politics requires sacrifice. The sacrifice of others, of course.

Most traders divulge whether they are making or losing money by the way they speak or move. They are either overly easy or overly tense. With Meriwether you could never, ever, tell. He wore the same blank half-tense expression when he won as he did when he lost. He had, I think, a profound ability to control the two emotions that commonly destroy traders (fear and greed) and it made him as noble as a man who pursues his self-interest so fiercely can be.

I think, a profound ability to control the two emotions that commonly destroy traders (fear and greed) and it made him as noble as a man who pursues his self-interest so fiercely can be.

Morgan Stanley wanted to be able to trade for itself in a way it could not trade for its customers; it just didn't want to seem as if it wanted to.

I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.

This was 1990 the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.

Weaklings are those who know the truth, but maintain it only as far as it is in their interest to do so, and apart from that forsake it.

Whatever we do for the love of God benefits our souls and our lives in a way that ego-motivated actions never can. Whatever we do for the love of God is done with sincerity because it is not motivated by self-interest. We leave our concern for gain and loss, success and failure, in the hands of God. We stop considering ourselves as the sole cause of our actions and their results. Consequently, we become the instruments of a deep wisdom and love.

There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong's sake; but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honour, or the like. There, why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong merely out of ill nature, why, yet it is but like the thorn or briar, which prick and scratch, because they can do no other.

But as important as material self-interest is, human beings are motivated by other things as well, motives that better explain the disparate events of the present. This might be called the politics of resentment. In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group's dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question.

no man is a good judge in his own case.

Os economistas baseiam toda uma teoria de comportamento social nesta premissa individualista. A teoria económica da ação coletiva defende que os indivíduos se agregam em grupos sobretudo como um meio de maximizar os seus próprios interesses individuais e não por qualquer motivo de sociabilidade natural.

The relatively high status of women in Western Europe was an accidental by-product of the church's self-interest. The church made it difficult for a widow to remarry within the family group and thereby reconvey her property back to the tribe, so she had to own the property herself. A woman's right to own property and dispose of it as she wished stood to benefit the church, since it provided a large source of donations from childless widows and spinsters.

Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.