Quotes About Self Aggrandizement

#1. We have developed a culture of self-interest, self-gratification, self-aggrandizement, and utter selfishness. We have institutionalized and disseminated these values as never before in human history.

Michael C. Hill

#2. Putting words onto paper - when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection - is a holy act.

Pat Schneider

#3. I'm not usually drawn to memoir - many run the risk of self-aggrandizement or score-settling.

Alice McDermott

#4. As readers, we sense when the game is being played for real and when something else is afoot: pride, showmanship, the pursuit of power, self-aggrandizement, revenge, making money. Not that there's anything wrong with any of that, but I dislike closing a book with the sense that I've been had.

Stacey D'Erasmo

#5. In LA, I mean, here's this place full of desperate and sad people who take their only pleasure from destroying others for the purposes of their own self-aggrandizement.

Heather Donahue

#6. I come from a place where everyone has great power, by your standards, and they steadfastly refuse to use it for self-aggrandizement ... anywhere ... ever.

J.Z. Colby

#7. Effective leaders are willing to use power and authority, but they're doing it in the service of the collective good, as opposed to self-aggrandizement.

Noel Tichy

#8. The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist ... He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.

Richard M. Weaver

#9. The passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.

Charles Horton Cooley

#10. That kind of pursuit is not beneficial to mankind: art for self aggrandizement at the cost of love.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya

#11. I would suggest that folks who have a platform of so-called celebrity, to the extent that they don't use that platform, or if they just use it for their own self-aggrandizement, it is certainly fed in a way that it goes to waste.

Hill Harper

#12. She already had enough people giving her shit for Aggrandizement, she didn't need a friend who was sworn to tear her down.

Charlie Jane Anders

#13. If the teachings of the Protestants in Europe gave birth to the Protestant ethics and the modern civilization, it becomes alarming that most of our charismatic teachings today mainly concentrate on individual aggrandizement

Sunday Adelaja

#14. I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.

Joshua Ferris

#15. In short, he was one of those early, daring manipulators who later were to seize upon other and even larger phases of American natural development for their own aggrandizement.

Theodore Dreiser

#16. We have seen that the tendency of republican governments is to an aggrandizement of the legislative at the expense of the other departments. The appeals to the people, therefore, would usually be made by the executive and judiciary departments.

James Madison

#17. Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

Steve Martin

#18. By the former of these (canon law), the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of their own order.

John Adams

#19. For what are the triumphs of war, planned by ambition, executed by violence, and consummated by devastation? The means are the sacrifice of many, the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few.

Charles Caleb Colton

#20. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.

John F. Kennedy

#21. By aggrandizing one's own abilities and achievements, the grandiose person remains out of touch with who they truly are and as such, remains prone to crossing the boundaries of others.

Steven Franssen

#22. Man's rights are linked with man's duties, and when they are distorted into extravagant claims for a species of freedom and equality and worldly aggrandizement which human character cannot sustain, they degenerate from rights to vices.

Russell Kirk

#23. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement

James Madison

#24. Moreover, he objected, "I have never done an official act with a view to promote my own personal aggrandizement, and I don't like to begin now.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#25. Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play.

Nathanael West

#26. The object of every free government is the public good, and all lesser interests yield to it. That of every tyrannical government, is the happiness and aggrandizement of one, or a few, and to this the public felicity, and every other interest must submit.

Marcus Junius Brutus The Younger

#27. Religions work for their own aggrandizement - strengthen the church and so on - and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants.

B.F. Skinner

#28. Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man can be.

William Clark

#29. Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as a tool of state aggrandizement, in which the private parties are stand-ins for governmental interests.

Charles C. Mann

#30. It is sometimes of God's mercy that men in the eager pursuit of worldly aggrandizement are baffled; for they are very like a train going down an inclined plane - putting on the brake is not pleasant, but it keeps the car on the track and from ruin.

Henry Ward Beecher

#31. The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious belief in lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#32. I have much power. In the days to come I will grow stronger, and I would hate for you to find yourself on the wrong side of that which cannot be avoided." "Hyperbole and mystic aggrandizement, you mean?

Katie MacAlister