Quotes About Selfishness

The grim egoism (egotism) of mourning of suffering

We're a strange animal, so often destroying what we love for selfish ends, and yet tantalized by the sense that there are other choices if only we had strength to make them. In the politics of 400 years ago, we find the same questions we battle with today.

The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

it is a melancholy truth that the behaviour of many among us might serve as the severest satire upon the [human] species. It has been a compound of inconsistency, falsehood, cowardice, selfishness and dissimulation.

Had Napoleon been thoroughly unselfish, Grant suggested, he would have been the greatest man in history, such was his military genius. When a young woman on board asked Grant to name the two figures he detested most in history, he shot back, "Napoleon and Robespierre."114

task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

his view that in framing a government "every man ought to be supposed a knave and to have no other end in all his actions but private interests." The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

He recoiled at the cowardice and selfishness he saw rampant in the New York legislature. "The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people," he told Morris. "In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly." Increasingly Hamilton despaired of pure democracy, of politicians simply catering to the popular will, and favored educated leaders who would enlighten the people and exercise their own judgment.

People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.

The human brain, instinctively, and unfailingly translates everything into terms of How does that affect ME? Start every appropriate sentence with you.

Egoists hold that a man's primary moral obligation is to achieve his own welfare (egoists do not necessarily agree on the nature of man's welfare).

The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours

It wasn't my doing. It is the drink and the laudanum and the opium and that bloody refusal to live. That selfish grief. I thought I could change it with magic, but I can't. People will be who they are, and there is not enough magic in any world to change that.

See, the trouble with Nietzsche, besides his being a real killjoy, is that he thinks like a spoiled seven-year-old who doesn't want to share his sandbox toys—" "Sam!

Aww, Sheba. So you're working for Evie. Honestly, who isn't working for himself in this meshuga world? Some people just hide it better than others.

Oh, why should it bother her? But it did. It wasn't so much that Evie wanted Jericho as she wanted him to keep wanting her. It was utterly selfish, she knew. More about her vanity than anything else.

Kind of guy who'd sell out his own mother to get ahead, that's for sure. Maybe he did.

Selsdon Man is designing a system of society for the ruthlessness and the pushing, the uncaring. His message to the rest is: you're out on your own.

Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.

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.

All suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction.

The sin which is indulged to the greatest extent, and which separates us from God and produces so many contagious spiritual disorders, is selfishness.

What we call "willing" is often but an inflation of ourselves, attended by a hardening.

Adversity relieves people of vanity and egotism. It discourages selfishness by proving that no one can succeed without the cooperation of others.