Orison Swett Marden Quotes

Watching people just look out for themselves, I think, is extremely interesting. It goes right back to something like 'The Beggar's Opera' - the underbelly of society, how it operates, and how that reflects their so-called betters.

Life is no longer a contest of great minds for great ends, but a pot house squabble.

We all seem to be about aggression and greed. It's a massive pressure that affects us all.

The world is so competitive, aggressive, consumive, selfish and during the time we spend here we must be all but that.

The kind of society which we still have is maybe, in some cases, getting worse. Competition is becoming a virtue. Intense competition drives people to go more and more into self-interest. Even to see other folks as competition.

Man is a predatory animal, and this aspect of his nature is nowhere better suited by environment than in the world of politics.

The hypocrisy of some is that we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and evolved, but we're still also driven by primal urges like greed and power.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

Politics is applied biology.

Human nature is such that people are born with a love of profit If they follow these inclinations, they will struggle and snatch from each other, and inclinations to defer or yield will die.

I used to look down on the world for being corrupt, but now I adore it for the utter magnificence of that corruption.

We should govern our actions by assuming that people are more good than bad. Whereas, most of our social policies dictate that people are more bad than good. That you know if you do something, it'll be seized by the rich to exploit the poor.

It's them that take advantage that get advantage in this world.

People are violent by nature. That’s why we rule the earth; we beat the crap out of everyone else.

Our civilization is built on competition, and competition evolves itself crime to so acute an infatuation has the lunacy of self-interest carried our dominant opinion.

Why do men go to war? Is it not in some way to better their condition. All these new fangled notions that men fight for other things than their own personal advantage is pure delusion. It is the solid things of life that men are ever after, though some of them haven't the courage to admit it. What is love of country but love of it's good things?

Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.

Nothing more clearly shows how little God esteems his gift to men of wealth, money, position and other worldly goods, than the way he distributes these, and the sort of men who are most amply provided with them.

However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods.

The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.

In the business arena, the standard rules of morality don't apply. What we're really looking for is efficiency. It doesn't do anyone any good to be nice to the weak. In a certain sense, competition is inefficient.

For the exploitation of human greed, they have devised comparison and competition. Right from childhood on, we are indoctrinated to compare and compete, and there is a word, a phrase: 'free and fair competition.'

I don't understand why everyone fights for power, money, fame.

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

The whole history of the world has been the struggle between the selfish and the unselfish.