Top 100 Self Interest Quotes
#1. If there is one thing I've learned in my years on this planet, it's that the happiest and most fulfilled people I've known are those who devoted themselves to something bigger and more profound than merely their own self interest.
John Glenn
#2. Since the Strict Father model is what holds Strict Father morality together, interference with the pursuit of self-interest threatens the foundations of the whole Strict Father moral framework - from the efficacy of moral strength to the validity of the moral order. The
George Lakoff
#4. Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
George Bernard Shaw
#5. Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food or fuel, but rather perceptions - like fear, honor and perceived self-interest.
Victor Davis Hanson
#6. [U]nless oppressed groups stick together, and on alliances of self interest rather than do-goodism; nothing can be accomplished in the long run to dismantle the apparatus of oppression.
Shulamith Firestone
#7. Every time I tried to express my most heartfelt desires to be morally good I met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I would give in to vile passions I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance-all of it was highly esteemed.
Leo Tolstoy
#8. Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic; and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will.
Will Durant
#9. The history of business has shown that companies usually only regulate themselves if they're forced to by legislation, or out of self-interest - often in the shape of a marketable message that will help sell more products.
Maelle Gavet
#10. Since the gap between the rich countries and the poor can be removed, it will be. If we are shortsighted, inept, incapable either of good-will or enlightened self-interest, then it may be removed to the accompaniment of war and starvation: but removed it will be. The questions are, how, and by whom.
C.P. Snow
#11. Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It's not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious-but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.
James C. Collins
#12. There is nothing wrong in being selfish provided you know where your self interest are. Once you start meditating regularly you will come to a stage where you will realize that selfish action are those which brings peace and welfare to all and not only for yourself.
Subodh Gupta
#13. But deep down inside, I was no longer enamored with the life I'd created. The only purpose I was serving was self-interest. While I rarely showed it to outsiders, my happiness waned day after day. A restless voice kept me up at night, telling me that until I found meaning, the money wouldn't matter.
Adam Braun
#14. The God of the Bible is the God of liberation rather than oppression; a God of justice rather than injustice; a God of freedom and humanity rather than enslavement and subservience; a God of love, righteousness and community rather than hatred, self-interest and exploitation.
Allan Boesak
#15. 56. Manifest plainness and embrace the genuine; lessen self-interest and make few your desires.
Lao-Tzu
#16. Self-interest and rational calculation can thus look like common sense, but there are other ways of understanding human motivations.
Derek Wall
#17. What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one,
and that is not only true, but identical,
that men always act from self-interest.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#19. Moral decisions are always easy to recognize," Odrade said. "They are where you abandon self-interest.
Frank Herbert
#20. Prejudice and passion and suspicion are more dangerous than the incitement of self-interest or the most stubborn adherence to real differences of opinion regarding rights.
Elihu Root
#21. There is a self interest in voting for a society where there is health care for all, where there's a mental health service for all, where there is education service for all.
Jeremy Corbyn
#22. No sort of activity is likely to be lasting if it is not founded on self-interest, that's a universal principle, a philosophical principle
Leo Tolstoy
#23. The [National Socialist] Party ... is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health only from within on the basis of the principle: The common interest before self-interest.
Adolf Hitler
#24. Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.
Honore De Balzac
#25. You're working not for the corporate interest, not for the government interest, not for your own self-interest. You have a higher calling.
Lynne Stewart
#26. It is proper for people to have friends, friendships without self-interest. Without friends, life is too lonely.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#27. Never appeal to a man's 'better nature.' He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.
Robert A. Heinlein
#28. Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction.
Greg Bear
#29. In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.
Ian McEwan
#30. Monstrous wars that had killed tens of thousands of innocent people weren't enough to inspire enlightened self-interest. Tiny loans, on the other hand, were. Money has no religion.
Bob Harris
#31. The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
George Santayana
#32. Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this rule has never deceived me
Marquis De Sade
#33. Free enterprise runs on self interest. This is socialism and it runs on loyalty ... if people were going to live by comparison shopping, the town would go bust ... If you live there you have to take it as a whole. That's loyalty.
Garrison Keillor
#34. Even if a sense of honor and duty were not the primary motivating factors in the Warren Commission's work, simple self-interest would naturally have induced its members not to try to cover up the existence of a conspiracy if, in fact, they found one.
Vincent Bugliosi
#36. A commercial civilization is money-oriented, profit-oriented. Commercial values always tend to wrench a society free of tradition.Economics from education to public service is being reorganized on the self-destructive basis of self-interest.
John Ralston Saul
#37. The priority list is: 1. The Strength Group 2. Moral Self-Interest 3. Moral Nurturance It
George Lakoff
#39. In a reality, what we should be doing is having quiet diplomacy with the Russians to convince them that it's in their self-interest to have a more stable Middle East because trade enriches us all.
Rand Paul
#40. I see no clear reason why the doctrine of self-interest properly understood should turn men away from religious beliefs.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#42. Our nation has both an obligation and self-interest in facing head-on the serious environmental, economic and national security threat posed by global warming.
John McCain
#43. There is no conservatism that will stand out against self-interest.
Homer B. Hulbert
#44. As the spiritual leader of six million people, the Dalai Lama can be credited with a significant renunciation of the authority of tradition - of the conventional politics of national self-interest as well as of religion.
Pankaj Mishra
#45. Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.
Hannah Arendt
#46. Democracy actually requires that the whole public be able to see common problems and address them and step outside of their own sort of narrow self-interest to do so.
Eli Pariser
#47. Businessmen should not put their finger in politics, because they tend to think only of their own self-interest. But I worry about the low morale in Italian industry and the lack of government initiatives to help the poor.
Diego Della Valle
#48. Citing both the Buddha and Aristotle, Sachs makes the case for a "middle path," a path of moderation and balance between work and non-work (what he calls, quaintly in this day and age, "leisure"), savings and consumption, self-interest and compassion, individualism and citizenship.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#49. Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#50. It is a feeble compassion that pulls up short where self-interest begins.
Norm Phelps
#51. If Congress does its job in this regard, the residents of Puerto Rico will be empowered to act in their own self-interest and express their future political status aspirations accordingly.
Dick Thornburgh
#52. Self-interest is an inexhaustible source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see truly is extraordinarily small.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#53. Whether you believe it a moral imperative or in the rich world's enlightened self-interest, securing the conditions that will lead to a healthy, prosperous future for everyone is a goal I believe we all share.
Bill Gates
#54. The notion that economic life is a distinct realm, governed by immutable laws of narrow self-interest, is giving way to a much older notion: economic life is only one strand in the rich web of human relationships.
Frances Moore Lappe
#55. The best headlines are those that appeal to the reader's self-interest, that is, headlines based on reader benefits. They offer readers something they want - and get from you.
John Caples
#56. You do not wake up one morning a bad person. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interest.
Robert Breault
#57. [...] something that was called an agreement is not necessarily always that. On the contrary, one party might advance their self-interest under the guise of a common decision, and in the long run it often becomes clear that someone is suffering, despite assurances to the contrary.
David Lagercrantz
#59. The values that I have are the values I was raised with, from where I'm from, which is a middle-class place. So that informs everything about me, my politics and all that stuff. I mean, politically, I vote against my own self-interest at every election. I actively ask these people to raise my taxes.
Matt Damon
#60. I was young and filled with a degree of self-interest that could rightly be called selfishness. Nothing was more important than the stories we wrote,
Ann Patchett
#61. Human beings are 'emotional amoral egoists,' driven above all by emotional self-interest. All of our thoughts, beliefs and motivations are neurochemically mediated, some predetermined for survival, others alterable.
Nayef Al-Rodhan
#62. Politics and self-interest have been so uniformly connected, that the world, from being so often deceived, has a right to be suspicious of public characters.
Thomas Paine
#63. I am not going to make any commitments to the teachers union to do anything until they do something that's other than in their own self- interest. And everything they have done so far is in their self-interests, and that's it.
Chris Christie
#64. Creative capitalism takes this interest in the fortunes of others and ties it to our interest in our own fortunes in ways that help advance both. This hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others can serve a much wider circle of people than can be reached by self-interest or caring alone.
Bill Gates
#65. By a kind of happy pre-established harmony, such as a later age discovered between the needs of society and the self-interest of the individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of spiritual grace, for it is a proof that a man has laboured faithfully in his vocation.
R. H. Tawney
#66. Whatever pretended causes we may blame our afflictions upon, it is often nothing but self-interest and vanity that produce them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#67. To be friendless is indeed to be unfortunate; but the hearts of men, when unprejudiced by any obvious self-interest, are full of brotherly love and charity. Rely, therefore, on your hopes.
Mary Shelley
#68. We are fast approaching a situation in which nobody will believe anything we [physicists] say in any matter that touches upon our self-interest. Nothing we do is likely to arrest our decline in numbers, support or social value.
Leo Kadanoff
#69. We see considerable strain in Russia, and that's obviously a matter of concern to us. It's in the very strong self-interest of Russia to continue on the reform path.
Warren Christopher
#70. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages
Adam Smith
#71. Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.
Gore Vidal
#72. Morality, after all, has nothing to do with selflessness. On the contrary, self-interest is precisely the basis of the categorical imperative.
Frans De Waal
#73. Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.
Allan Bloom
#75. I mean what does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest, in any given circumstance.
Aldous Huxley
#76. Most apparent conspiracies result from consistent local self-interest with no need for global coordination.
Patri Friedman
#77. Loyalty's a dangerous foundation. Tends to wash away in a storm. Self-interest stands in any weather.
Joe Abercrombie
#78. The Lord does not love wicked people with self-interest and involved in inquity
Sunday Adelaja
#79. The cost of leadership is self-interest.
Simon Sinek
#80. novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If
Karen Armstrong
#81. Individuals motivated by self-interest, self-indulgence, and a false sense of self-sufficiency pursue selfish ambition for the purpose of self-glorification.
C.J. Mahaney
#82. Ordinarily, everything we do is in our self-interest. Everything.
Anthony De Mello
#83. It turns out that one can perpetrate all manner of heinous villainy under a cloak of courtesy and good cheer ... a man will forfeit all sensible self-interest if he finds you affable enough to share your company over a flagon of ale.
Christopher Moore
#84. Attacking the indecency of life in much of the Southern Hemisphere is no longer a matter of grace, of charity, of patronizing kindness. It is a matter of intense self-interest.
Anthony Lewis
#85. People acting in their own self-interest is the fuel for all the discovery, innovation, and prosperity that powers the world.
John Stossel
#86. Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.
Marilynne Robinson
#87. Self interest determines loyalty or betrayal.
James Cook
#88. No one enters politics to serve their community. They do it to feed their own rampant egos. Self-interest remains the number one priority. A politician's sole objective is to win office, and everything else, including what's best for the country and its citizens, comes a distant second. Marlowe's
Nathan Allen
#89. Unchecked power, driven by self-interest, scarcity, grandiosity and aggression, is deadly to God's original fruitful purposes.
Andy Crouch
#90. To forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, the greatest good.
Desmond Tutu
#91. The true price of leadership is the willingness to place the needs of others above your own. Great leaders truly care about those they are privileged to lead and understand that the true cost of the leadership privilege comes at the expense of self-interest.
Simon Sinek
#92. The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.
Felix Frankfurter
#93. The visual arts must communicate to the human spirit, forcing individuals to reflect on themselves and their existence beyond their own self-interest.
Dean Mitchell
#95. Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them on the basis of morality.
William Sloane Coffin
#96. The cost of leadership," explains Lieutenant General George Flynn of the United States Marine Corps, "is self-interest.
Simon Sinek
#97. Even wisdom has to yield to self-interest.
Pindar
#98. The Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs.
Donald Berwick
#99. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.
John Perry Barlow
#100. What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.
Julian Barnes
