Self Interest Quotes - Page 6

• I see no clear reason why the doctrine of self-interest properly understood should turn men away from religious beliefs.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Religious, Men, Self

  Alexis de Tocqueville (2004). “Tocqueville: Democracy in America”, p.615, Library of America

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• In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.

  Orson Scott Card

  Intelligent, Self, People

  Orson Scott Card (2010). “Ender's Game”, p.89, Macmillan

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• 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

  Self, Civilization, Tradition

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• Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their ''evil'' look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it

  Camille Paglia

  Cat, Animal, Self

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae”, p.89, Yale University Press

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• The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way.

  Milton Friedman

  Running, Government, Self

  "The Phil Donahue Show", www.youtube.com. 1979.

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• I am supporting David Cameron purely out of cynical self-interest.

  Boris Johnson

  Self, Cynical, Interest

  "Boris Johnson ... in his own words" by Isabelle Chevallot, www.theguardian.com. July 16, 2007.

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• Opportunism is self interest seeking with guile often involving subtle forms of deceit, especially calculated efforts to mislead, distort, disguise, obfuscate, or otherwise confuse. This vastly complicates the problems of economic organisation. Plainly if it were not for opportunism all behaviour could be rule governed

  Oliver E. Williamson

  Self, Effort, Deceit

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• Competition is like experimentation in science, a discovery process, and it must rely on the self interest of producers, it must allow them to use their knowledge for their purposes, because nobody else possesses the information

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Self, Discovery, Competition

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• A spirit of harmony can only survive if each of us remembers, when bitterness and self-interest seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny.

  Barbara Jordan

  Peace, Equality, Destiny

  Barbara Jordan (1999). “Barbara C. Jordan--selected Speeches”

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• People and countries have done an enormous amount of damage in their attempts to bring about the best possible world. Communism is an obvious example. But so is British imperialism, which was not grubby self-interest all the way down, but at least in part a sincere attempt on the part of people who felt they were superior to other people to magnanimously improve the lot of their inferiors.

  Dale Jamieson

  Country, Self, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The psychological peer pressure that the left has employed - and deployed, actually - on young people has been overwhelmingly successful. It has created droves and droves of people that vote against what they know is right, vote against their own self-interest, in exchange for feeling good about themselves and also being immune from criticism.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Successful, Self, People

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• Aristotle thought that humans are rational animals and Hobbes thought that we act on the basis of rational self-interest. If only! It's not that we never do these things, it's that they are hardly constituative of who and what we are.

  Dale Jamieson

  Animal, Self, Hobbes

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I am not a communist first and an individualist second. I am an individualist first, and I don't mean this in the shallow, purely egotistical sense of self-interest and everyone else be damned. I mean this in the true sense of enlightenment, recovery of personality, and the full development of personality.

  Murray Bookchin

  Recovery, Mean, Self

  Interview with Jeff Riggenbach, reason.com. October 1979.

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• The difference between neoliberalism and fascism or Nazism or other forms of totalitarianism is that it takes questions of ideology seriously. It takes the educational sphere seriously, and it tells people there's no alternative; that market freedom is really freedom in general; that a rabid kind of individualism is all that matters; that as Ayn Rand used to say, "self interest is the ultimate virtue" - and people believe this stuff. Because they have no other discourse.

  Henry Giroux

  Educational, Believe, People

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• For a company to excel, employees must be reassured that self-interest, not the company's, is their foremost priority. We believe an employee who puts himself first will be motivated to perform.

  Ricardo Semler

  Believe, Self, Priorities

  Ricardo Semler (2004). “The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works”, p.39, Penguin

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• Self-interest leads to honing your skills, the better to trade with.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Self, Skills, Interest

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• It's going to have to come to a point where politicians in their own political self-interest think it's safe and advantageous to come out on the side of drug law reform. Right now, they don't care about drug safety. They just care about their standing with the electorate.

  Rick Steves

  Thinking, Self, Law

  Source: blog.sfgate.com

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• Just like self-interest is not selfishness, well, confidence is not a negative. Confidence is not an off-putting thing. It's, in fact, necessary for all good leaders.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Self, Leader, Facts

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• [Former chief executives] come away thinking that America needs a strong, functioning presidency to succeed, and they become very protective of that office. Democrats and Republicans alike are willing to put aside their own party's self-interest to preserve the presidency. That's been true over the decades.

  Nancy Gibbs

  Strong, Party, Thinking

  "Time editors discuss new book about presidents at McDaniel College". Interview with Mary Carole McCauley, articles.baltimoresun.com. April 13, 2013.

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• Here's what I do believe very strongly: that once capitalism comes into existence, once it creates this mythology of a stingy nature, then that myth has to be exorcised. In other words, we have to get out of people's heads the idea that without a market economy, without egotism, competition, rivalry and self-interest, without all the technological advances that [Karl] Marx imputed to capitalism, we have to eliminate the feeling that we would sink into some kind of barbarism.

  Murray Bookchin

  Believe, Ideas, Self

  Source: robertgraham.wordpress.com

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• Quite apart from the Church's financial self-interest in getting me out of the way, Baltimore is an overwhelmingly Catholic city and like most good Christians, they felt we ought to be punished for our unorthodox views.

  Madalyn Murray O'Hair

  Christian, Self, Views

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• Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Self, Division Of Labor, Three

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• With the rise of capitalism, it became more obvious that people pursue individual self-interest. The great nationalist in Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini, a wonderful philosopher, said that we need the nation. We need something that people can lean on, from which they can then reach out to the whole world. The idea of all humanity is too vague. It can't motivate human aspiration in a reliable way.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Self, Ideas, People

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

  R. D. Laing

  Thinking, Smell, Self

  R. D. Laing (1990). “The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise”, p.19, Penguin UK

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• Proper business planning demands that you focus on the self-interest of the customer at all times.

  Brian Tracy

  Self, Focus, Demand

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