Quotes about Self-interest

It's a law of survival, isn't it?—to seek the best. I didn't come for your sake. I came for mine.

If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud.

One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility.

History shows that any people who are sheeplike in following their leadership (so long as their personal self-interests are satisfied) may one day awaken to find that their nation has changed in dramatic ways.

So if meditation did liberate you from obedience to these feelings, it would be, in a certain sense, dispelling an illusion—the illusion you implicitly subscribe to when you follow the feeling, the illusion that the rage, and for that matter the revenge it inspires, is fundamentally "good." It turns out the feeling isn't even good in the basic sense of self-interest.

The prophet Jeremiah said that 'from the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain,'18 and the prophet Isaiah said, 'all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.'19 Our good deeds are stained with self-interest and our demands for justice are mixed with lust for vengeance. Ironically, it's the best people who most readily recognize and admit their own shortcomings and sin.

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.

To sum up, that mortification is the best which results in the elimination of self-will, self-interest, self-centred thinking, wishing and imagining. Extreme physical austerities are not likely to achieve this kind of mortification. But the acceptance of what happens to us (apart, of course, from our own sins) in the course of daily living is likely to produce this result.

Is there such depravity in man as that he should injure another without benefit to himself?

Watching people just look out for themselves, I think, is extremely interesting. It goes right back to something like 'The Beggar's Opera' - the underbelly of society, how it operates, and how that reflects their so-called betters.

I am not morally obligated to care more for a man than he cares for himself.

Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves.