Steven Soderbergh Quotes

Experts are human, and humans respond to incentives. How any given expert treats you, therefore, will depend on how that expert's incentives are set up.

People only speak to get something.

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.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

No man will work for your interests unless they are his.

Men keep their agreements when it is an advantage to both parties not to break them; and I shall so frame my laws that it will be evident to the Athenians that it will be for their interest to observe them.

People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests.

Of course we are doing this primarily for ourselves, but I know our fans dig most of it, too.

The vulgar crowd values friends according to their usefulness.

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

I lose faith in any cooperative, commonwealth; cannot see how, after all, there will be incentives.

We must take man as we find him, and if we expect him to serve the public we must interest his passions in doing so.

Politicians and bureaucrats are no different from the rest of us. They will maximize their incentives just like everybody else.

No man can live happily who regards himself alone, who turns everything to his own advantage. Thou must live for another, if thou wishest to live for thyself.

The rewards system is a powerful driver of behavior and therefore culture.

What men call friendship is no more than a partnership, a mutual care of interests, an exchange of favors - in a word, it is a sort of traffic, in which self-love ever proposes to be the gainer.

Most people enter into relationships with an eye toward what they can get out of them, rather than what they can put into them.

I think we also have learned the lesson that we have to have better incentive structures.

Ordinarily, everything we do is in our self-interest. Everything.

People will love you and support you when it's beneficial.

I don’t know what world you live in, but in mine, people only do things for you for one of two reasons. The first is if they want something in return. And the second is if they feel like they owe you something.

Take egotism out and you would castrate the benefactors.

Men keep agreements when it is to the advantage of neither to break them.

From now on I'm thinking only of me." Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way." "Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?