Self Interested Quotes

#1. Imponderable Sir, I presume from some if not all of your many reputations that you might prefer honest and convinced unbelief to the hypocritical and self-interested affectation of faith or the smoking tributes of bloody altars.

Christopher Hitchens

#2. Rational egoism is the only morality that is for human life; thus, it is the only morality that is actually moral. Those who choose to be rationally self-interested thereby make the most of their life - and they are morally good because of it.

Craig Biddle

#3. Let me let you in on a little secret. There is no such thing as an international community. There are self-maximizing, self-interested states that will push their interests as far as possible.

Condoleezza Rice

#4. You cannot have democracy without the institutions. You cannot have a democracy that is built on the moods of self-interested people.

Bashar Al-Assad

#5. We all need a story. It just turns out that the story we have been told for years - that people are naturally and primarily competitive and self-interested and that life is best shaped around that bleak fact - is bunkum

Ed Mayo

#6. I don't see myself as a hero because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.

Edward Snowden

#7. The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behavior it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern.

Herman E. Daly

#8. I like it when characters are some combination of appealing and maybe flawed or self-interested. I think in terms of scenes, and what I want a scene to achieve, and I think that the psychological realism arises from that.

Curtis Sittenfeld

#9. Heritage Action is a self-interested fundraising organization led by a former Giuliani staffer who is not taking counsel from real conservatives ... It is a worthless organization to the conservative movement. I'll be the first to say that.

Geoff Davis

#10. Legal behavior is not incompatible with rational, self-interested behavior.

Leonid Hurwicz

#11. The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.

Michael Lewis

#12. Since the decision to become a parent is invariably self-interested, it is my belief that a parent's obligation is to the child, and the child's obligation is to itself.

Zen Cho

#13. Conditions that make us feel anonymous, when we think that others do not know us or care to, can foster antisocial, self-interested behaviors. My

Philip G. Zimbardo

#14. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.

Thomas Paine

#15. I guess because I'm a liberal I think it's not people's natural instinct to be completely self-interested.

Matthew Weiner

#16. Neoclassical economics ... has uncovered important truths about the nature of money and markets because its fundamental model of rational self-interested human behavior is correct about 80% of the time.

Francis Fukuyama

#17. Compassion is a fundamental principle of meditation. Meditation is not a narcissistic, self-interested path. It provides the foundation for love, integrity, compassion, respect and sensitivity (Feldman, 1998, p.2).

Christina Feldman

#18. Alas few socialists are either benevolent enough to work hard at these occupations out of benevolence or self-interested enough to work hard at them for money.

John McCarthy

#19. Democrats see our voluntary military supported by taxpayer dollars as their personal Salvation Army. Self-interested behavior, such as deploying troops to serve the nation, is considered boorish in Manhattan salons.

Ann Coulter

#20. The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

Robert Hass

#21. Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

Paul Bloom

#22. Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.

Honore De Balzac

#23. 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

#24. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.

Steven Pinker

#25. Who but the Atman is capable of removing the bonds of ignorance, passion and self-interested action?

Adi Shankaracarya

#26. But it is one thing to transmit the divine through a blasting storm of holy noise, another thing entirely to write a history forged from human voices, imperfect memories, self-interested accounts.

Geraldine Brooks

#27. The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

Tom Stoppard

#28. All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.

Mary McCarthy

#29. You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.

Tony Kushner

#30. Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#31. If the sad truth be known, writers, being the misfits we are, probably ought not to belong to families in the first place. We simply are too self-interested, though we may excuse the flaw by calling it 'focused.'

Roger Rosenblatt

#32. By learning to see and appreciate beauty, we learn to reject self-interested pragmatism. If someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple.

Pope Francis

#33. She's like one of those Siamese cats. You know - totally self-interested, way too beautiful, way too aware of the fact, and totally willing to use it to get what she wants.

Melinda Metz

#34. I'm just shallow and self-interested, and don't get out much because I'm afraid of real commitments.

Henry Rollins

#35. Everyone living under the social contract we call democracy has a duty to act responsibly, to obey the laws, and to abandon certain types of self-interested behaviors that conflict with the general good.

Simon Mainwaring

#36. People in government are self-interested just like people in business.

David Boaz

#37. Hollywood wants its heroes to be virtuous, but it defines virtue in a way that excludes any action that is self-interested. If virtue means putting others ahead of self, then it's clear that most people, let alone most capitalists, aren't very virtuous.

Alex Tabarrok

#38. And as far as doing God's work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.

Maureen Dowd

#39. In elections in Iceland, I have always been an abstainer. It seems like politics is such a small bundle of self-important people, who don't have much to do with things I'm interested in.

Bjork

#40. Vanity is so constantly solicitous of self, that even where its own claims are not interested, it indirectly seeks the aliment which it loves, by showing how little is deserved by others.

William Gilmore Simms

#41. I am very interested in Ayurvedic medicine and hope to explore it more someday. I only have a very superficial understanding of the whole thing right now. But learning what my body type is has shifted my whole self-care regime a bit, and I feel better because of it.

Taylor Schilling

#42. Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.

Dale Carnegie

#43. In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#44. I think young adults get a bad rap for being self-absorbed and self-centered. My experience going around the United States and speaking in schools is that teenagers here are very interested in the fate of their peers around the world.

Patricia McCormick

#45. I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction.

Dave Eggers

#46. To be extremely self-centred, only interested in your own satisfaction, always brings negative consequences in the long run.

Dalai Lama

#47. My combined experiences, doing different films, has made me very concerned about and interested in how you protect your creative self when the work, by default, is going to be judged by people.

Sharlto Copley

#48. You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

Dale Carnegie

#49. I'm not interested in clothes that just convey a certain look or fashion. Clothes for me have always been a form of self-expression.

Phoebe Philo

#50. I've never been interested in self-promotion and that side of politics; and if that means people judge that you're less prominent than others, that's a choice I've been willing to make.

Douglas Alexander

#51. Though it may be interesting to know how many hairs there are on the human head, or how the giant red spot on the surface of Jupiter was formed, the real truths we are interested in are those about ourselves.

Stephen Richards

#52. Hey!" He snapped out of his musings as Destiny's hand trailed down his body to cup his less than interested cock through his trousers. "Claws to self, Vampira, I assume you brush your teeth twice a day but I have no idea where those hands of yours have been.

Jane Cousins

#53. Socrates worked towards making people question themselves. He like to provoke self-interrogation but wasn't particularly interested in the answers that emerged; he just like to set off the thought process.

Eric Cantona

#54. Chasing after a guy who's not interested in you will rip the hell out of your self-respect. Better to face facts now because the longer you put it off, the harder it'll be.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

#55. If you never sit still, it does not even hint to that deeper self in you that you are interested. By practice, by showing up, we are signaling that deep motor, that hum of life, that we are ready: Help us. Pay attention and lead us out of our confusion.

Natalie Goldberg

#56. I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.

Jane Green

#57. If I can have an effect on influential women and men, if they seek me out because they are interested in self-knowledge and the fun of meditating, then I'm glad to help. That's why I'm here.

Frederick Lenz

#58. I am very interested in the enlightenment of women. Very few teachers of advanced self discovery work with women, and if they do it's usually in a very second handed way. They treat women as second class citizens.

Frederick Lenz

#59. This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.

Philip Pullman

#60. How anybody dresses is indicative of his self-concept. If students are dirty and ragged, it indicates they are not interested in tidying up their intellects either.

S.I. Hayakawa

#61. It's often suggested that as a culture, we're only interested in immediate gratification. Fast food. Self-checkout. Downloadable music, movies, books. Instant coffee, instant rebates, instant messaging. Instant weight loss! Shall I go on?

Stephanie Perkins

#62. Odd how people interested in religion spend so much time trying to convert the obvious meaning of their texts that are their authority.

Nanamoli Thera

#63. All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know.

Simone De Beauvoir

#64. People interested in change and personal development need larger and larger environments in which to live. Their views expand. Their perspectives broaden. Their interests change. They seek bigger challenges. And they need people in their lives who will make room for their growth.

Steve Goodier

#65. Jodi Melnick is hotly self-absorbed. Her onstage musicians are much too loud, and like so many narcissistic performers, she goes on much too long: She's interested in herself; why wouldn't we be?

Robert Gottlieb

#66. We learn by doing, not just by thinking. So I feel like beyond Buddhism, or Hinduism, or Judaism, or Christianity we need today to think about a global spirituality. We need to make it very personal and transformative for one self, and each other, together for those who are interested.

Surya Das

#67. To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.

Walter Pater

#68. People always want to define you by what you do. I started saying: 'i am not too concerned with what i'm going to do. I am more interested in who i am becoming. I want to be a lover of God and people.

Shane Claiborne

#69. My father said it was a delightfully odd - and dangerously self-destructive - quirk of humans that we were far more interested in pointless trivia then in genuine news stories.

Jasper Fforde

#70. In time, we lose our freshness and spontaneity of true conversation. These are areas in which everyone interested in self-improvement will seek to improve.

Dale Carnegie

#71. I never read reviews - I never have. I've never read message boards, either. I'm just not interested in it in any way - I'm not interested in it inflating my ego, and I'm not interested in it improving my self-worth. So, I don't read them.

Kate Levering

#72. I've long been interested in looking at the culture of consumerism and also was interested in this connection between the American dream and the house, and the house being kind of the ultimate expression of self and success.

Lauren Greenfield

#73. Some are interested in the mysterious, but lose interest once they think they know you.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

#74. I am not interested in being a role model, or in fulfilling the expectations of others. I know I am of most use to others and to myself by being this unique self: Nature, I have noticed, is not particularly devoted to copies, and human beings needn't be either.

Alice Walker

#75. God is not interested in your ability. He is
interested in your availability. When you avail
your ability to God, you become a faithful leader.

Israelmore Ayivor

#76. I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self.

Mary McCarthy

#77. A different path of self-reflection is required if we are interested in the borders rather than the beliefs of Christianity. In my experience - in my conversations with "unbelieving neighbours" - I have learned that Christianity appears quite differently from the borders. Take,

Anthony Ledonne

#78. [The Player is] not a truthful indictment of Hollywood. It's much uglier than I portrayed it, but nobody would've been interested if I'd shown just how sadistic, cruel and self-orientated it is.

Robert Altman

#79. The Ottoman Empire ... The rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone pretty much - were mostly interested in robbing them - and they left them alone to run their own affairs ... with a lot of local self determination.

Noam Chomsky

#80. If a musician is making a mediocre, self-indulgent body of work, they have to know that, for the most part, people aren't going to be interested.

Moby

#81. I was deeply interested in the little family history which he detailed to me with all that candor which a Frenchman indulges whenever mere self is the theme.

Edgar Allan Poe

#82. I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

A.S. Byatt

#83. Love someone because their soul inspires you, not because you're interested in the relief from loneliness and companionship they can provide. Anybody can do that. Not just anybody can show you to yourself.

Brianna Wiest

#84. If you are interested in photography because you love it and are obsessed with it, you must be self-motivated, a perfectionist, and relentless.

Mary Ellen Mark

#85. The measure of self-assurance is how deeply and sincerely interested you are in others; the measure of insecurity is how much you try to impress them with you.

Mark Goulston

#86. Eloquence is an art of saying things in such a way (1) that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel themselves interested, so that self-love leads them more willingly to reflection upon it.

Blaise Pascal

#87. I suppose it's fair to say that I am interested in the invention of self or selves. We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts.

Sarah Jones

#88. People who are advanced meditators don't worry about liberation and self-realization; they instead are interested in the welfare of others and aiding others in their liberation.

Frederick Lenz

#89. Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?

J.G. Ballard

#90. I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

Errol Morris

#91. If you're interested in the door to the heavens opening, start with the door to your own secret self.

Elizabeth Lesser

#92. I am only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Susan Sontag

#93. I'm an engineer by trade so I've always been interested in engineering and technology but also I've a strong interest in self build and off-grid properties and how it would affect us in terms of lifestyle.

Andy Griffiths

#94. The object of self-love is expressed in the term self; and every appetite of sense, and every particular affection of the heart, are equally interested or disinterested, because the objects of them all are equally self or somewhat else.

Joseph Butler

#95. I'm interested in helping women become courageous in being exactly who they are. Because the only way to change anything is to do it from your genuine self.

Elizabeth Lesser

#96. The ego must be developed, not for its own sake, but because it is needed by society. If you are only interested in self-realization then you cannot make a good painting. To do this you have to have thought about forming, and about how ideas of forming stem from history.

Joseph Beuys

#97. Keep thinking, keep interested, keep praying, keep dreaming. Be mentally sensitive at all times so that the magic word that motivates you may one day speak to your deep inner self.

Norman Vincent Peale

#98. What would it be like to communicate from a part of your own self that is absolutely free from self-consciousness, that is fearless, uncorrupted, and passionately interested in the truth?.

Andrew Cohen

#99. The only rich women who ever interested me, the ones who were ever my friends, were adventuresses---people who were total self-creations.

Truman Capote

#100. I'm interested in the self. And in the limits and transformations of self. And in self presentation. And in doubt. And in playing with the audience's expectations. But I don't like dressing up like on Halloween.

Rachel Zucker