Quotes About Egoism

Self-interest usually brings injustice with it.

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

Every man of action has a strong dose of egoism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be regarded as high qualities if he can make them the means to achieve great ends.

I say that man is entitled to his own happiness and that he must achieve it himself. But that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy.

I am a man who does not exist for others.

The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.

Every man for himself.

Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.

Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp and escaped from the jungle.

Your ego is not your amigo.

People will jump through hoops if you just make them feel like a god.

You need to see everything else—everyone else—as expendable, as less than yourself.

If I have to choose between you and me - I like me better.

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

Now you see, Tom," said Mr. Harthouse (...); "every man is selfish in everything he does, and I am exactly like the rest of my fellow-creatures.

We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater good—for putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. It's called 'moral vanity'.

Many worried that the public was increasingly confusing freedom with debauched egoism. "A new competitiveness was abroad in the land," Wood says, "and people seemed to be almost at war with one another."4 It was a season of "inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for," as the theologian William Ellery Channing described his times.5

The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is 'mine,' and it is not a general one, but is - 'unique,' as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!

We must master our egoism, and through this mastery, step outside ourselves and educate ourselves in giving. Fasting requires that we rediscover all that is alive around us, and reconcile ourselves with our environment.

I can bet Salman doesn't earn that much... well, at least nowhere near me.

He was a cynic and like most cynics, totally selfish and self-indulgent.

La società moderna è ben lontana dal costituire un esempio: molte delle sue manifestazioni - la pubblicità, il culto del denaro, le disuguaglianze abissali, l'egoismo feroce, l'uniformità dei gusti, delle opinioni, delle coscienze - sono un concentrato di orrori e idiozie.

But you must sacrifice your individuality,' Guy told her. 'It's nothing but egoism. You must unite with other right-thinking, self-abnegating people – then you can achieve anything.' The idea filled her with gloom.

Here's a free tip," his father says: "The feds aren't terribly impressed by infantile egoism. In fact, if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn't be here—the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I'm going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won't bring her up again if you don't.