Top 100 Altruism's Quotes
#1. Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.
Ayn Rand
#2. The person who works for recognition devalues the work he does, that awards are first and foremost political instruments, that altruism's true name is always Anonymous.
David Marusek
#3. Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.
Ayn Rand
#4. Compassion, along with love, is the face of altruism.
Dalai Lama
#5. To be doing good deeds is man's most glorious task.
Sophocles
#6. ...Bad leaders are known to destroy one, more or even all of the foundations of their people's way of life...
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#7. Her four pupils bored into his, her white face perfectly immobile. "Altruism? What's happening to you?" "I don't know," he said.
William Gibson
#8. I am an actress, I earn money, I am well-known. I don't think it is altruism to become engaged in humanitarian work. It's the least one can do.
Emmanuelle Beart
#9. For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself.
Deepak Chopra
#10. Human ties are the greatest distorters of reality because they tend to conceal man's worst selfish instincts.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#11. A humanitarian seldom makes a good lover. For a lover's world revolves around their lover, while a humanitarian's world revolves around the world.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#12. It's in the nature of the humans and the entire animal kingdom to return blow for blow, cheating for cheating, lie for lie, to hit back with all our might. But what makes us true humans is the power to not hit back.
Abhijit Naskar
#13. Altruism is innate, but it's not instinctual. Everybody's wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.
David Rakoff
#14. You seem cynical because you're always talking about that selfish behavior that's dressed up as altruism. It doesn't mean there isn't altruism. It just means that it's harder to make jokes about altruism.
Stephen Colbert
#15. Altruism is for those who cannot endure their desires.
Mason Cooley
#16. Altruism is the best source of happiness. There is no doubt about that.
Dalai Lama
#17. Humans have long since possessed the tools for crafting a better world. Where love, compassion, altruism and justice have failed, genetic manipulation will not succeed.
Gina Maranto
#18. There is a growing movement called effective altruism. It's important because it combines both the heart and the head.
Peter Singer
#19. The good shall prevail in the end, the truth shall be the rule and the Cameroonian soul shall be free," Hans said in an emotion-choked voice, "However, we should never lose our heads; we should always be prepared to forgive all the repentant souls.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#20. Writers are the most tormented of all the different categories of artists that are out there in the world.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#21. Huh! Mankind always comes up with ideas to make up for the follies of the status quo. But what happens if those ideas are inflexible and fail to respond to the changing times. They end up betraying the people who believed in them.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#22. Social Science ... led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay.
David Riesman
#23. For many years, I tried to make New Year's resolutions. I made lists and shot for great heights: I would show altruism and exert moral strength, patience and all those other great attributes.
Henry Rollins
#24. Pharmaceutical companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new HIV/AIDS treatments not out of altruism but because they can make up those research costs in sales.
David Mixner
#25. Hold onto your creativity, that idealism that is rooted in some degree of innocence and a firm belief in something finer than the things we already have.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#26. I want to feel proud and happy about my selflessness. But what happens when being selfless takes away a big part of your self?
Jaye Robin Brown
#27. There's a lot of evidence in evolutionary sciences that show that altruism and acting in ways that are empathetic to others are actually beneficial on an evolutionary basis.
Neill Blomkamp
#28. Don't sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there's nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you.
Karl Lagerfeld
#29. I've never been terribly interested in why people give, because their motivation is rarely what it seems to be, and it's almost never true altruism.
Donald J. Trump
#30. Whatever they say about it, but being altruistic is not so simple for everyone. Not to look and sound like despotism, altruism must be learnt, and it's a long way, which in fact begins from our egoism, for really, a human can't love others if he doesn't love himself first.
Lara Biyuts
#31. Loving others is the greatest gift we can give ourselves. Altruism that rewards one's self.
Allan Lokos
#32. It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.
Rebecca Solnit
#33. Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else?
Lewis Thomas
#34. Adopting a child is a blessing. Those who perceive themselves as "doing someone a favor" are not ready to adopt. Pity is such an insult. When making a lifetime commitment to someone, it's no time to let guilt or excessive altruism take over.
William R. Cutrer
#35. Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.
Ayn Rand
#36. In today's world, human desires far supersede human needs. Waste, as you can see, is the result of that disparity.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#38. ...No man is foolish when his friend betrays him because a man's world is most serene when he has people to trust and call friends. After all, is it not often said that a friend is another self?
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#39. Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.
Jonathan Sacks
#40. ...A legendary leader distinguishes himself as someone who gets ahead of his people from an impasse and futile general consensus, and then finds new grounds that constitute the base from which a unique course of his people's destiny is charted...
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#41. That doesn't mean they're not still angling for something. The most charitable people in the world are choosing altruism, not because it's a noble endeavor, but because being noble fulfills a need within them.
Lindsay Buroker
#42. Whenever I see people getting a bad deal I want to step in and do something about it. Of course, this is not pure altruism - there's a profit to be made too.
Richard Branson
#43. Altruism is the kind of pie best eaten with a lot of gravy and little inspection of the kind of kidney it's stuffed with.
M T Anderson
#44. The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
Alison Gopnik
#45. That's what I've never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any day of the week; at least you can play chicken with him and know he'll stick to the rules.
Mike Carey
#46. When somebody you love dies, a phase of life's innocence dies with that person, and a part of you dies as well.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#47. Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.
G.E. Moore
#48. The ultimate altruism is nothing but the sacrifice of one's self for the benefit of others. Love yourself but never forget to be altruistic to others in need.
Debasish Mridha
#49. Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism.
Ellen Key
#50. Happiness is a skill, emotional balance is a skill, compassion and altruism are skills, and like any skill they need to be developed. That's what education is about.
Matthieu Ricard
#51. True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
Henry James
#52. Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#53. Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.
David Sloan Wilson
#54. Authentic happiness can only come from the long-term cultivation of wisdom, altruism, and compassion, and from the complete eradication of mental toxins, such as hatred, grasping, and ignorance.
Carmine Gallo
#56. Kindness is a source of relief to the soul of the giver, creating a sense of fortitude that is incomprehensible to those who do not know what kindness is all about.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#57. The best thing about having money is that you can use it to help someone else.
Marty Rubin
#58. The only thing altruism will get you here is a boot stomping on your head.
Henry Mosquera
#59. We do things in life to make others happy. We make sacrifices because that feeling - the one I once thought was altruism, but have since learned is just love - it makes us feel good. We give, but it's never selfless.
Ginger Scott
#60. Most sound minds resent flattery, because they see the egotism behind the screen of altruism.
Fulton J. Sheen
#61. 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'.
Greg Egan
#62. I suppose the spiritual trance is harder to break than the religious one because the delusion is more difficult to distinguish. You have a quasi-cloud of ideas that include wonderful concepts of openness and altruism without the blatant anthropomorphism of religion.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
#63. The practice of cultivating altruism has a beneficial effect not only from the religious point of view but also from the mundane point of view, not only for long term spiritual development but even in terms of immediate rewards.
Dalai Lama XIV
#64. A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.
Richard Dawkins
#65. The basis of love that most people share is the intimacy they developed with their partners, the intensity of their attraction, or the similarity of their thought patterns,
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#66. People were the same everywhere, no matter what lofty vows they proclaimed. Help was given only in the hope of its being reciprocated. Expectations of reward lurked behind every act of altruism.
Steven Erikson
#67. It is the sincere horror of it that gets others motivated, so say Watson and Andrews; the dysfunction caused by the onset of depression may serve a useful function in that it is a device for the elicitation of altruism.
Andrew Solomon
#68. If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ayn Rand
#69. Just as altruism tells an individual that however much he is sacrificing, his duty is to sacrifice more, the Progressives concluded that however much Americans were giving, morality required them to give more.
Yaron Brook
#70. With true love, you can move mountains, make unusual sacrifices, live a life of deprivations and still be happy.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#71. [Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner belonged to] that small army of brave people who made it their duty, without thought of themselves or hope or expectation of reward, to strive for unpopular causes.
[Chapman Cohen on the death of noted freethinker and peace advocate Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner]
Chapman Cohen
#73. Feelings, rationale and values are the top qualities that make a person exceedingly human.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#74. The things that trip a person into love aren't the grand, sweeping traits you expect (must adore Waugh, display altruism, respect my space). The truly endearing properties are the small and apparently trivial gestures and habits that differentiate us one from another.
S.A. Jones
#75. Altruism is the surest and most effective way to bring about genuine life satisfaction.
Dalai Lama XIV
#76. Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism - the belief that the individual exists to serve others - is translated into political reality.
Nathaniel Branden
#77. I think preconceived ideas or prejudgments are meant to give us an edge whenever we are dealing with others we don't know or haven't made the effort to understand.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#79. Most people live lives that are full of mysteries, lives whose ultimate purpose we may never really understand. But for the sake of serenity, we must believe in life's nobleness.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#80. It takes a female to have a baby,
It takes a woman to raise a child,
It takes a mother to raise them correctly,
It takes a warrior to show them how to change the world.
Shannon L. Alder
#81. True heroes and ideas never fall in the final sense of the word. They can only encounter temporary setbacks in their difficult journey to progress and success,
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#82. Take a stand that reflects the widest horizons of your soul if you don't want to be a slave to external powers.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#83. ...A canonical leader is someone whose exemplary rule might have appeared to be for the alleviation of the pains and miseries of a particular group, but which in reality is for the advancement of humanism...
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#84. We need the wisdom to accept the fact that this world abounds with issues we cannot solve; and we need to part ways with those people, ideas and things that are a vexation to the soul.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#86. A nationalist will blindly follow his country to his death out of love for it. A patriot will stand up for and even against his country to his death out of love for it.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#87. Empathy, as we have seen, leads to caring, altruism, and compassion. Seeing things from another's perspective breaks down biased stereotypes, and so breeds tolerance and acceptance of differences.
Daniel Goleman
#88. True heroes don't fall. They only encounter temporary setbacks as they forge ahead towards progress.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#89. Remember these, Sons! Truth presented with tenderness enriches the soul of man and enhances humanity in the process. A Franco-Cameroonian relation based on truth and nurtured with tenderness will be to the benefit not only of Kamerun and France, but also of mankind as a whole.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#90. I had always thought that the 'good,' and the 'bad' and the 'violent' did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference.
Sergio Leone
#91. I'm not a legend or a hero, I don't slay dragons, I don't do any of the things that a real hero can. But I can make things better, one day at a time, for most of the kingdom.
Mercedes Lackey
#92. The dignity we create in the time allotted to us becomes a continuum with the dignity we achieve by the altruism of accepting the necessity of death.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#93. Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation-and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyone's suffering.
Ayn Rand
#94. It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself,
than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all
connected with you.
Charlotte Bronte
#95. The smallest, earliest gifts forever alter your trajectory for doing good. This is what I mean by the compound interest of altruism. Start early to maximize the compound interest in your efforts.
Biz Stone
#96. Love only grows by sharing. You can only have more for yourself by giving it away to others.
Brian Tracy
#97. Poverty of young men alone behind the
stairways, who practice
alchemy inside bottle caps, who know
the altruism of a last syringe.
Jim Carroll
#98. What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?
Winston Churchill
#99. In both the global community and the family, human beings need harmony and cooperation, which comes through mutual respect. Altruism is the most crucial factor.
Dalai Lama XIV
#100. They are surprised that he did it, though, which shows you that the male mind expects very little in the way of altruism from it's fellows.
Stephen King
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