Quotes About Self-interest

the only touchstone of merit seeming to me to be the way someone could be useful in connection with the one thing that seemed important—my love. Then, perhaps out of duplicity, or in a genuine surge of affection inspired by gratitude, by self-interest, and by all the physical features of Mme de Guermantes that nature had replicated in her nephew, I went on to add:

Self-interest implicit in not being wrong in our pre-judgment limits the time we shall remember it and encourages us to believe we never indulged in it.

There are no true friends in politics.

The hypocrisy and social sham of the world, and that I have mastered the following hard truths of life--that there is no love without lust--no friendship without self-interest--no religion without avarice--and no so-called virtue without its accompanying stronger vice. Who, knowing these things, would care to take part in them!

Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.

It stands to reason that if sacrifices are being given, somebody is collecting sacrifices.

Sometimes you have to do what right and the best for you.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

Drama is Drama. Bullying is Bullying. No matter what reasons people do it for, it will usually be out of self-interest or for their own enjoyment.

Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good

It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.

Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value. We are neither entitled to be unselfish at someone else's expense nor is there any merit in being unselfish if we have no choice. The members of a society who in all respects are made to do the good thing have no title to praise.

Republicans have gone from being a party that touted virtue to being the most squalid and grubby expression of institutionalized self-interest in the modern history of the American republic.

My commitment to the security and future of Israel is based upon basic morality as well as enlightened self-interest. Our role in supporting Israel honors our own heritage.

I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

our genes' primary goal is not necessarily harmony between mates, but rather greater success for themselves.

If you press people to identify the motives behind their self-interest it usually boils down to four items: money, power, status, and popularity.

You must look out for number one. If you don't, no one else will.

Cicero may even have convinced himself, whatever the evidence, that Catiline was a serious threat to the safety of Rome. That, as we know from many more recent examples, is how political paranoia and self-interest often work.

Knowledge is power. Always pays to be nice until nice no longer serves you.

I am easy-going right up to the borders of my self-interest.