Quotes About Selfishness

BAKUNIN:    Left to themselves, people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.

She knew from personal experience how hard loving was, how selfish and how easily sundered. Withholding sex or relying on it, ignoring children or devouring them, rerouting true feelings or locking them out. Youth being the excuse for that fortune-cookie love—until it wasn't, until it became pure adult stupidity.

The girl's face looks greedy, haughty and very lazy. The cream-at-the-top-of-the-milkpail face of someone who will never work for anything; someone who picks up things lying on other people's dressers and is not embarrassed when found out. It is the face of a sneak who glides over to your sink to rinse the fork you have laid by her plate. An inward face ---whatever it sees is its own self. You are there, it says, because I am looking at you.

Selfishness is uncomfortable even for the selfish. Hence the rise of gated communities: the privileged don't like to be reminded of their privileges - if these carry morally dubious connotations.

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest:

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor.

When we think that we are separate, we put ourselves in constant conflict, trying to get ours, always in fear of losing what we have, alienating others whom we use for our selfish purposes, lying and cheating to make sure that we aren't left behind.

We have achieved the four freedoms: Freedom to ask; freedom to receive; freedom to be a leech; and freedom to loaf.

Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.

Inside of every being there is a constant war being raged. The part that tell us to do what is right and what is decent and the part of us that is self-serving. The part that wants what it wants regardless of who is hurt getting it.

We want to hurt others but don't want to be hurt in return

And I like to keep whatever is mine remaining that way. It's a funny little game to play and it's a slippery slope. I always say to myself I'm never going to give anything away because there's never any point or benefit for me.

I write about the power of trying, because I want to be okay with failing. I write about generosity because I battle selfishness. I write about joy because I know sorrow. I write about faith because I almost lost mine, and I know what it is to be broken and in need of redemption. I write about gratitude because I am thankful - for all of it.

Would it be possible to find a more ungrateful boy, or one with less heart than I have!

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Third basic law of human stupidity: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring loss.

Don't tell people you care about them when all you really care about is getting your own way.

the world is full of evil wretches who seek nothing but their own self-gratification, and they don't give a damn whom they hurt in the process.

You are a monster, deathly, solipsistic to the bone and you're blasphemous because all you want is You

At that time men went off to school to prepare themselves for the uplift of a downtrodden people. In our time too many Negroes go to school to memorize certain facts to pass examinations for jobs. After they obtain these positions they pay little attention to humanity. This attitude of the "educated Negro" toward the masses results partly from the general trend of all persons toward selfishness,

Too many Negroes go into medicine and dentistry merely for selfish purposes, hoping thereby to increase their income and spend it in joyous living. They have the ambition to own fine automobiles, to dress handsomely, and to figure conspicuously in society. The practice of these professions among poor Negroes yields these results.

In… the book of Egoism, it is written, possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

Sein Egoismus war eine rationale Reaktion auf die Wirklichkeit, in der er lebte.

If I wanted to honor you, I´d let you retire. I am planing to make you run the kingdom and fight the wars while I eat and drink