#Self Interest Quotes

“Were I the Moor I would not be Iago. In following him I follow but myself; Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so for my peculiar end. For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In compliment extern, ’tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at. I am not what I am”

“Now these fellows in Washington wouldn't be so serious and particular if they only had to vote on what they thought was good for the majority of the people in the U.S. That would be a cinch. But what makes it hard for them is every time a bill comes up they have things to decide that have nothing to do with the merit of the bill. The principal thing is of course: What will this do for me personally back home?”

“It is awful hard to get people interested in corruption unless they can get some of it.”

“But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?”

“Every individual strives to grow and exclude, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature.”

“You may regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer, but if you cannot, mind your own business.”

“Every guy looks in his pocket and then votes.”

“Everyone places his good where he can and has as much of it as he can, in his own way.”

“No man can help another without helping himself.”

“If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves.”

“Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.”

“People have a vested interest in promoting one set of polices rather than finding out what the truth is.”

“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”

“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.”

“Prejudice will fall in a combat with interest.”

“The reason so many problems do not get solved in Washington is that solving those problems is not the No. 1 priority: Re-election is.”

“I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.”

“Human society is made up of partialities. Each citizen has an interest and a view of his own, which, if followed out to the extreme, would leave no room for any other citizen.”

“Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality.”

“The last end of every maker, as such, is himself, for what we make we use for our own sake; and if at any time a man make a thing for the sake of something else, it is referred to his own good, whether his use, his pleasure, or his virtue.”

“You are a lover of your own experience ... not of me ... you turn to me to feel ur own emotion”

“Our consciences take no notice of pain inflicted on others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to us.”

“Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.”

“The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done.”

“The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.”

“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”

“When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting.”

“When he has the power to see things detached from self-interest and from the insistent claims of the lust of the senses, then alone can he have the true vision of the beauty that is everywhere.”

“If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even,- for that is the seat of sympathy,-he forthwith sets about reforming the world.”

“A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights. Men are moved by only two mechanisms: fear and self-interest. Victory belongs to the most persevering.”

“Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.”

“A cowardly act! What do I care about that? You may be sure that I should never fear to commit one if it were to my advantage.”

“I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else.”

“Men are less hesitant about harming someone who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared because love is held together by a chain of obligation which, since men are wretched creatures, is broken on every occasion in which their own interests are concerned; but fear is sustained by dread of punishment which will never abandon you.”

“If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly people grant your requests when those requests appeal to their self- interest, you can have practically anything you go after.”

“The more we help others, the more we help ourselves”

“I would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I'm a human being, too. And I'm on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.”

“It is ever true that he who does nothing for others, does nothing for himself." ~ Goethe”

“In a seriously intended intellectual emancipation a person's mute passions and cravings also hope to find their advantage.”

“Anyone may fairly seek his own advantage, but no one has a right to do so at another's expense.”

“Those who are bent on revolutionizing society may be divided into those who seek something for themselves thereby and those who seek something for their children and grandchildren.”

“[ Uncle Sam] is not sending 20 billion dollars to South America because he loves those people down here. He's sending it - sending it to them because he needs their friendship, he needs their allegion - their allegiance.”

“The miller believes that all the wheat grows so that his mill keeps running.”

“Men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end.”

“I always had an aversion to your apostles of freedom; each but sought for himself freedom to do what he liked.”

“The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.”

“Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing it or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual's pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others' interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation.”

“If we lacked curiosity, we should do less for the good of our neighbor. But, under the name of duty or pity, curiosity steals into the home of the unhappy and the needy. Perhaps even in the famous mother-love there is a good deal of curiosity.”

“But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return perhaps something for something of himself - that he gave up in order to have more here or at least to feel that he has "more".”

“While you have people who are actually fronting for your needs and wants, sometimes your needs and wants may not be right for you. The people around you are just trying to keep their jobs.”