Quotes About Self-interest

The four classes are: 1) Good for you, good for other people, 2) Good for you, bad for other people 3) Bad for you, good for other people and 4) Bad for you, bad for other people.

You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.

Rather than coming together to make the best possible decision for the entire organization, they become lobbyers for their own constituents

Empathy doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations — in war, for example — you want to do exactly the opposite.

To forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, the greatest good.

The visual arts must communicate to the human spirit, forcing individuals to reflect on themselves and their existence beyond their own self-interest.

All is egotism. The only people whose mainspring is not egotism are the dead and perhaps idiots.

That's wonderful. I do like a man that tells you right out he's looking out for himself. Don't we all? I don't trust a man that says he's not. And the man that's telling the truth when he says he's not I distrust most of all, because he's and ass and an ass that's going contrary to the laws of nature.

Justice. It wasn't about the greater good. It was about what was right and wrong on an individual basis. Person by person. Because if you neglected the people, the idea of a greater good was a pipe dream created by those whose idea of the "greater good" almost always tended to favor themselves and people like them.

the business of politics, which essentially meant screwing others before they got around to screwing you.

you mean?" "My way of looking at the world is that some folks do what they want, and they don't care what happens to others, so long as it's good for them.

It's probably part of my naïveté that I don't want to put the issue in political terms when it's probably irreducibly political. Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.

nobody does anything for nothing. ... it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody.

Of course I'm an egoist. Where do you get if you aren't?

Respondents who say that they want to find purpose and meaning in life also rate public-interest goals high in importance. Self-interest and materialist goals are unrelated to public-interest goals or to the desire to find purpose and meaning in life.

The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behavior it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern.

Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read, and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

Peter the Hermit, Calvin, and Robespierre, each at an interval of three hundred years and all three from the same region, were, politically speaking, the Archimedean screws of their age, at each epoch a Thought which found its fulcrum in the self-interest of mankind.

Toplumu, aç?kgöz davran?p herkesin zarar?na kendi mutlulu?unu kurma kuram?yla aç?klamak y?k?c? bir ö?retidir,bunun a??r ç?kar?mlar?, yasaya, insanlara ya da bireye verdi?i zarar? bile belli etmeden, gizlice elde edilen her ?eyin iyi ve uygun biçimde kazan?ld???na inand?r?r insan?.

Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.

Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint.

It's a law of survival, isn't it?—to seek the best. I didn't come for your sake. I came for mine.

When business starts using its voice for the benefit of the country as a whole, not just in its narrow self interest, it can really be the force that can make the changes that need to be made.