A little group of willful men reflecting no opinion but their own have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.
A wise unselfishness is not a surrender of yourself to the wishes of anyone, but only to the best discoverable course of action.
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 interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.
Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called ''self-interestedness.'' This was not a
Remember how often you have postponed minding your interest, and let slip those opportunities the gods have given you. It is now high time to consider what sort of world you are part of, and from what kind of governor of it you are descended; that you have a set period assigned you to act in, and unless you improve it to brighten and compose your thoughts, it will quickly run off with you, and be lost beyond recovery.
Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.
The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race.
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.