Altruism Quotes - Page 6

• Egoism , which is the moving force of the world, and altruism , which is its morality , these two contradictory instincts , of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.

  Joseph Conrad

  Moving, Two, World

  Joseph Conrad “Heart of Darkness”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.

  Steven Pinker

  Mean, People, Guy

  "The Importance of Being Businessworthy" by Per L. Saxegaard, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 4, 2015.

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• The market, if it can be kept honest and competitive, does provide very strong incentives for work effort and productive contributions. In their absence, society would thrash about for alternative incentives-some unreliable, like altruism; some perilous like collective loyalty; some intolerable, like coercion or oppression.

  Arthur Melvin Okun

  Loyalty, Wisdom, Strong

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• Altruism is for those who can't endure their desires. There's a world as ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moan our earnest neighbors might think a crime. It's where we could live. I'll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has. --Mon Semblable

  Stephen Dunn

  Disappointment, Love You, Thinking

  Stephen Dunn (1995). “New and Selected Poems 1974-1994”, p.230, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Is this what you have in mind,' I asked the Dalai Lama, 'when you say in teachings that the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the world are the most selfish beings of all, that by cultivating altruism they actually achieve ultimate happiness for themselves?' Yes. That's wise selfish,' he replied. 'Helping others not means we do this at our own expense. Not like this. Buddhas and bodhisattvas, these people very wise. All their lives they only want one thing: to achieve ultimate happiness. How to do this? By cultivating compassion, by cultivating altruism.

  Dalai Lama

  Wise, Selfish, Teaching

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• Altruism accrues little benefit to those lying cold in the gutter.

  Raymond E. Feist

  Lying, Gutters, Benefits

  Raymond E. Feist (1993). “Silverthorn”, Spectra

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• Because I took an oath to help people. To protect them from The League and any corrupt government. (Devyn) Yeah, and I know people better than to believe that for even an instant. Altruism is dead. People use and they take until you’re nothing but a bleeding corpse on the ground at their feet. (Alix)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Believe, Government, Feet

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• A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

  George Eliot

  Opinion, Cynicism, Fellows

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.76, Penguin

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• Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.

  Arundhati Roy

  War, Reason

  Arundhati Roy (2003). “War Talk”, p.68, South End Press

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• Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we’re actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons.

  John Green

  Book, Character, Thinking

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• Do you know that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth the irrational.

  Ayn Rand

  Real, Philosophical, Fighting

  Ayn Rand (1997). “Letters of Ayn Rand”, p.382, Penguin

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• Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

  Frank Herbert

  Kindness, Cynicism, Cruelty

  Frank Herbert (2003). “Dune”, p.434, Penguin

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• Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.

  Ayn Rand

  Philosophical, Men, Opposites

  Ayn Rand (1963). “For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)”, p.45, Penguin

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• A learned County Court judge in a book of memoirs recently said that the overwhelming amount of his time on the bench was taken up with people who are persuaded by persons whom they do not know to enter into contracts that they do not understand to purchase goods that they do not want with money that they have not got.

  Wilfred Greene, 1st Baron Greene

  Book, Taken, Court Judges

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• the psychological attitudes which are indispensable in the American market place are disastrous to family life. Family life ... requires yieldingness, generosity, sympathy, altruism, tenderness-all the qualities, in fact, which lead straight to bankruptcy. ... the American family is tragically out of gear with the profit structure which has mushroomed up around it.

  Margaret Halsey

  Attitude, Generosity, Quality

  Margaret Halsey (1952). “The Folks at Home”

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• Which is more subversive-and corrosive-to believe in altruism or to see it simply as a cloak of self interest? Even if altruism did not exist, it would be necessary to believe in it. Pessimists in power are prone to despotism.

  Frank Prochaska

  Believe, Self, Volunteer

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• ... Don't mistake any of this for altruism...Fear and greed just doesn't work. If you want to be successful, quality and service just works better.

  Larry Ellison

  Mistake, Successful, Greed

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• Self-interest, to be sure, is one of the most important, but we have many other motives - honesty, self-respect, altruism, love, sympathy, faith, sense of duty, solidarity, loyalty, public-spiritedness, patriotism, and so on - that are sometimes even more important than self-seeking as the driver of our behaviors.

  Ha-Joon Chang

  Loyalty, Honesty, Self

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• Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit?

  Aldo Leopold

  Lying, War, People

  Aldo Leopold (1989). “A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There”, p.165, Oxford University Press, USA

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• While it is true that the taking of life not yet born or in it's final stages is sometimes marked by a mistaken sense of altruism and human compassion it cannot be denied that such a culture of death, taken as a whole, betrays a completely individualistic concept of freedom, which ends up by becoming the freedom of "the strong" against the weak who have no choice but to submit.

  Pope John Paul II

  Strong, Taken, Compassion

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• Forgiveness is the most effective way of dealing with arguments; altruism and forgiveness bring humanity together so that no conflict, however serious, will go beyond the bounds of what is truly human.

  Dalai Lama

  Happiness, Humanity, Together

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• The biggest pests are the people who use altruism as an alibi. What they passionately wish is to make themselves important.

  Isabel Paterson

  People, Wish, Important

  Isabel Paterson (1993). “The God of the Machine”, p.40, Transaction Publishers

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• Restoration ecology is experimental science, a science of love and altruism. In its attempts to reverse the processes of ecosystem degradation it runs exactly counter to the market system, to land speculation, to the whole cultural attitude of regarding the Earth as commodity rather than community. It is a soft-souled science.

  Stephanie Mills

  Running, Attitude, Land

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• Social Science … led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay.

  David Riesman

  Men, Culture, Debt

  David Riesman (1966). “Individualism Reconsidered, and Other Essays”

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• We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Rebel, Machines

  "The Selfish Gene". Book by Richard Dawkins, www.huffingtonpost.com. 1976.

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