Top 100 Self Interest Quotes
#1. Mature striving is linked to long-range goals. Thus, the process of becoming is largely a matter of organizing transitory impulses into a pattern of striving and interest in which the element of self-awareness plays a large part.
Gordon W. Allport
#2. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it ... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'.
Robert A. Heinlein
#3. Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.
Beau Willimon
#4. Happiness is attained, not through self-interest, but through unconditional fidelity in endless love of eternal light.
Aaron Cohen
#5. As far as the stars are from the earth, and as different as fire is from water, so much do self-interest and integrity differ.
Lucan
#7. Friendship without self-interest is one of the rare and beautiful things of life.
James F. Byrnes
#8. If my ruling disposition is self-interest, I perceive that everything that happens to me is always for or against my self-interest; if, on the other hand, my ruling disposition is obedience to God, I perceive Him to be at work for my perfecting in everything that happens to me.
Oswald Chambers
#10. To be agreeable, all that is necessary is to take an interest in other persons and in other things, to recognize that other people as a rule are much like one's self, and thankfully to admit that diversity is a glorious feature of life.
Frank Arthur Swinnerton
#11. The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest; and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.
Boris Johnson
#12. When men organize themselves into groups, and they make rules based on common or self-interest, it's always tangled and political.
Andrew Dominik
#13. The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way.
Jacob Bronowski
#14. There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.
Chanakya
#15. These assumptions lead progressives into other traps: assuming that hard facts will persuade voters, that voters are "rational" and vote in their self-interest and on the issues, and that negating a frame is an effective way to argue against it. 5.
George Lakoff
#16. We have the ability (under special circumstances) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. I called this ability the hive switch.
Jonathan Haidt
#18. I had a very, very difficult relationship with my mother, who was supremely self-centred. She was hilariously self-centred. She did not really take interest in anything that didn't immediately affect her.
John Cleese
#19. Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare.
Nick Tosches
#20. Surrender your self-interest. Love others as much as you love yourself. Then you can be entrusted with all things under heaven.
Laozi
#22. A person who cultivates any interest in self-improvement will necessary encounter successes and failures, both of which life lessons can be useful to remember when seeking distant mileposts. Failure stimulates evaluation and new learning. Success stimulates development and retention of good habits.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#23. We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#24. Secularism does not accept many things as absolutes. Its principal objectives are pleasure and self-interest. Often, those who embrace secularism have a different look about them.
James E. Faust
#25. For scholarship - if it is to be scholarship - requires, in addition to liberty, that the truth take precedence over all sectarian interests, including self-interest.
John Charles Polanyi
#26. Something is clearly wrong with Kansas and the rest of Middle America when it comes to letting economic self-interest guide their voting.
Howell Raines
#27. But the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.
Samuel Johnson
#28. Anybody who does not evolve can become a self-parody. I have to evolve on a daily basis just to keep my own interest in what I do.
Marilyn Manson
#29. Nations, like people, are often more pragmatic than they know or can explain.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#30. We need to make a very clear distinction between what is in our ego's self-interest and what is in our ultimate interest; it is from mistaking one for the other that all our suffering comes.
Sogyal Rinpoche
#31. Everything is interconnected. My
interest is linked to everyone else's. Our survival and future are linked. Therefore the destruction of your so-called enemy is actually the destruction of your self.
Dalai Lama
#33. Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.
Philip Larkin
#34. The passions possess a certain injustice and self interest which makes it dangerous to follow them, and in reality we should distrust them even when they appear most trustworthy.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#35. To play the demagogue for purposes of self-interest is a cardinal sin against the people in a democracy, exactly as to play the courtier for such purposes is a cardinal sin against the people under other forms of government.
Theodore Roosevelt
#36. Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.
Saul D. Alinsky
#37. 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
#38. because I know I would do the best job. Maybe the only thing that's important to you is money, but that matters the least to me. Leaders care about the common good, not the self-interest of one selfish man.
E.L. Todd
#39. The guy in the airplane goes with you. So he has self-interest to do the good things, too, and I don't know of any pilots that don't have a self-interest in staying alive.
Gordon Bethune
#40. Redtail was a brave warrior. His loyalty to ThunderClan could never be doubted. I always relied on his judgment, for it bore witness to the needs of the Clan, and was never swayed by self-interest or pride. He would have made a fine leader.
Erin Hunter
#41. She's very selfish. Not exactly self-centered, but totally indifferent to everyone and everything. Don't you agree?'
'I don't think that's possible,' said Mr Satterthwaite, slowly. 'I mean everyone's interest must go somewhere.
Agatha Christie
#42. All of our relationships are based on self-interest, discrimination and a perverse need for gain.
Bryant McGill
#43. With the more endowed nations constrained by their own higher technological capacity for self-destruction as well as by self interest, war may have become a luxury that only the poor peoples of this world can afford.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#44. How do we give credible hope to the billion poorest people in the world? It requires compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get serious ... If economic divergence continues, combined with global integration, it will build a nightmare for our children.
Paul Collier
#45. My commitment to the security and future of Israel is based upon basic morality as well as enlightened self-interest. Our role in supporting Israel honors our own heritage.
Gerald R. Ford
#46. Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide with the self-interest of the rest of the world. That's inevitable.
Pankaj Mishra
#47. The corporation's legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others.
Joel Bakan
#48. We've gotta restore the American people's confidence in the ethics process by ensuring that political self-interest can no longer prevent politicians from enforcing ethics rules.
Barack Obama
#49. The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.
Peter Block
#50. Compassion being action without motive, without self-interest, without any sense of fear, without any sense of pleasure.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#51. Golf in the interest of good health and good manners. It promotes self-restraint and affords a chance to play the man and act the gentleman.
William Howard Taft
#52. You are One with everything. When you are clear about this, your definition of self-interest will change.
Neale Donald Walsch
#53. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
#54. A keener interest in trinkets of self-adornment than in people is a symptom of alienation.
Kobo Abe
#55. Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment - originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.18
Jonathan Haidt
#56. Defender of the liberty that I idolize, myself more free than anyone, in coming as a friend to offer my services to this intriguing republic, I bring to it only my frankness and my good will; no ambition, no self-interest; in working for my glory, I work for their happiness.
Marquis De Lafayette
#57. Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.
Ayn Rand
#60. A half century ago Herbert Wechsler could justify the legal right of deadly force self-defense in terms of the "universal judgment that there is no social interest in preserving the lives of the aggressors at the cost of those of their victims." That is not a universal judgment today.
Don Kates
#61. True interest appears when the self identifies itself with ideas or objects, when it finds in them a means of expression and they become a necessary form of fuel for its activity.
Jean Piaget
#62. I definitely have a shareholders' perspective. I'm not doing that altruistically. I'm doing that because it's in my own self interest to do it. I think that's good for my other shareholders because they go along with me: If I do well for myself, then they do well for themselves.
Harold Simmons
#63. Thus to forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, that greatest good, communal harmony that enhances the humanity and personhood of all in the community.
Desmond Tutu
#64. Happiness lies in making others happy, in forsaking self-interest to bring joy to others.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#65. Just as God, above all, is free of every need and self-interest, the spiritual man who has the Spirit struggles and becomes perfected in the love according to Christ, love that is delivered of all need and self-interest.
John Romanides
#66. Where does this guy's ambition go? That's very peculiar. I think he's a very disturbing person, I think he's a very disturbing politician. Personally, I feel his interest is a self-interest
Helen Mirren
#67. This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.
Maria Popova
#68. What impels every man to the utmost exertion in the service of his fellow man. Is, in the market not compulsion on the part of gendarmes, hangmen and penal courts, it is self interest.
Ludwig Von Mises
#69. Ferris: Are you going to be as impractical as that? Rearden: The evaluation of an action as practical, Dr. Ferris, depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. Ferris: Haven't you always placed your self-interest above all else? Rearden: That is what I am doing right now.
Ayn Rand
#70. Joining a band of brothers together, a group with one common interest or mission, whether as a company, a team, or a motorcycle club, requires not only a commitment to loyalty but an understanding of self-preservati on as well..
Sonny Barger
#71. The United Nations has come under the control of outlaw nations and self-serving special interest groups.
Ginny Brown-Waite
#73. They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free- free, in essence, to contend, to engage in an umpired strife, to use property to get property.
Richard Hofstadter
#74. Real love is to expand our own capacity for tolerance and caring, to actively seek another's well-being. All else is simply a charade of self-interest. Zeke
Richard Paul Evans
#75. What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.
Alain De Botton
#76. There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#77. Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.
John Osborne
#78. Even if this advice to portfolio decision makers to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed. Few people will commit suicide without a push. And fewer still will pay good money to be told to do what is against human nature and self-interest to do.
Paul Samuelson
#79. The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.
Carlos Fuentes
#80. Adam Smith had one overwhelmingly important triumph: he put into the center of economics the systematic analysis of the behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interest under conditions of competition.
George Stigler
#82. The claims of existing social arrangements and of self interest have been duly allowed for. We cannot at the end count them a second time because we do not like the result.
John Rawls
#83. Proper business planning demands that you focus on the self-interest of the customer at all times.
Brian Tracy
#84. The separation of religion from the practical affairs of society is a convenient doctrine for those who fear that social change would threaten of modify their own political and social self-interest.
William Stringfellow
#85. The true patriot is motivated by a sense of responsibility and out of self interest for himself, his family, and the future of his country to resist government abuse of power. He rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state.
Ron Paul
#87. Morality is the position you hold on abortion before your teenaged daughter gets pregnant. after that everyone acts in their own self-interest.
Mike Nemeth
#89. Games are the only force in the known universe that can get people to take actions against their self-interest, in a predictable way, without using force.
Gabe Zichermann
#90. There is an ongoing battle between conscience and self-interest in which, at some point, we have to take sides.
Robert Breault
#92. To be just, is not enough to refrain from injustice. Once must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self interest as the driving force of society.
Pedro Arrupe
#93. Inflammatory passion and selfish interest characterizes most men, whereas ambition characterizes men who pursue and hold national office. Such men rise from the people through a process of self-selection, since politics is a dirty business that discourages all but the most ambitious.
Tom Cotton
#94. Society remains unflagging in its almost pathological pursuit of material self-interest.
William Marsden
#95. The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: men's rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice. If
Ayn Rand
#96. We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the word selfishness.
Frederic Bastiat
#97. As frost to the bud, and blight to the blossom, even such is self-interest to friendship; for confidence cannot dwell where selfishness is porter at the gate.
Martin Farquhar Tupper
#98. The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.
Georges Bataille
#99. By dismantling the narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going beyond 'black' and 'white,' we may construct new values, new institutions and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and racial oppression.
Manning Marable
#100. To become a token woman
whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters
is to become something less than a mansince men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
Adrienne Rich
