Quotes About Self-interest

Economists studied what people did, rather than what we said, because we did what was best for us.

self-determination theory." Many theories of behavior pivot around a particular human tendency: We're keen responders to positive and negative reinforcements, or zippy calculators of our self-interest, or lumpy duffel bags of psychosexual conflicts.

Many theories of behavior pivot around a particular human tendency: We're keen responders to positive and negative reinforcements, or zippy calculators of our self-interest, or lumpy duffel bags of psychosexual conflicts.

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.

The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.

People are just greedy animals, after all.

The corporation's legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others.

They want to know what's in it for them.

Don't trust anyone blindly. Most people you meet with are with you only for their own sake and interest.

We did not become libertarians because we are altruists.

Everyone's for free markets except when it affects your own business.

When a nation was faced with a choice between abstract principle or complete self-interest, it took self-interest every time.

Google puts itself first. So does every other company on the planet. There is no requirement that you have to put yourself second. Indeed, why would you?

By the same token, if conscience and empathy were impediments to the advancement of self-interest, then we would have evolved to be amoral sociopaths.

Men are so stupid and concerned with their present needs, they will always let themselves be deceived.

Let this, then, be done in you; and suffer not yourself to be attached to anything, however good it may appear; it is no longer such to you, if it in any measure turns you aside from what God desires of you. For the divine will is preferable to every other good. Shake off, then, all self-interest, and live by faith and abandonment; here it is that genuine faith begins truly to operate.

I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and '30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals.

Health and spirits can only belong unalloyed to the selfish man—the

Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity. Transparency, for this reason, was vital: "We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing." Athenians found "the fruits of other countries" to be "as familiar a luxury as those of [their] own." The walls made their citizenship global.

Our nation has both an obligation and self-interest in facing head-on the serious environmental, economic and national security threat posed by global warming.