What we call personality (...) has become the most impersonal thing in the world. Its pale and featureless face appears like a ghost at every corner and in every crowd. ... Individualism kills individuality, precisely because individualism has to be an 'ism' quite as much as Communism or Calvinism. The economic and ethical school which calls itself individualist ended by threatening the world with the flattest and dullest spread of the commonplace. Men, instead of being themselves, set out to find a self to be: a sort of abstract economic self identified with self-interest. But while the self was that of a man, the self-interest was generally that of a class or a trade or even an empire. So far from really remaining a separate self, the man became part of a communal mass of selfishness.
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Where self-interest is suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control that dries up the wellspring of initiative and creativity.
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To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations. ... For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.
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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.
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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.
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The truth is that good ethics sometimes is good business, but sometimes it's not. It depends on one's goals and how one defines good business. Sometimes, good ethics can end in bankruptcy. Of course, so can bad ethics. A fairer statement is that good ethics can be a very powerful business asset and that good things tend to happen to companies and individuals that consistently do the right thing and bad things tend to happen to those that even occasionally do the wrong thing. But the crucial point is that the moral obligation to live according to ethical principles is not dependent on whether it's advantageous. People of character do the right thing in the pursuit of virtue, not self-interest.
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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.
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The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts --the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria --are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.
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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 neccessities but of their advantages.
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Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.
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Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
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I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.
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It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success.
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Reason, progress, unselfishness, a wide historical perspective, expansiveness, generosity, enlightened self-interest. I had heard it all my life, and it filled me with despair.
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Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But let it be considered that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self- interest.
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Friendship without self-interest is one of the rare and beautiful things of life.
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The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race.
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The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.
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There are two principles of established acceptance in morals; first, that self-interest is the mainspring of all of our actions, and secondly, that utility is the test of their value.
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Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.
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The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.
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The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.
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Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit; All with me's meet that I can fashion fit.
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That good disposition which boasts of being most tender is often stifled by the least urging of self-interest.
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Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest.
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Self-interest makes some people blind, and others sharp-sighted.
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Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.
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Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
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Human service is the highest form of self-interest for the person who serves.
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Men are Moved by two levers only: fear and self interest
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