E. W. Howe Quotes

Nothing is properly one's duty but what is also one's interest.

A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future.

The only thing I find interesting is self-interest.

I have always served the public to the best of my ability. Why? Because, like every other man, it is to my interest to do so.

It is easier to do one's duty to others than to one's self. If you do your duty to others, you are considered reliable. If you do your duty to yourself, you are considered selfish.

I think most people act in their self-interest.

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act, we become a party to injustice.

Duty, then is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less.

In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom

Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.

Duty does not consist in suffering everything, but in suffering everything for duty. Sometimes, indeed, it is our duty not to suffer.

To be good, and do good, is the whole duty of man comprised in a few words.

She had looked her duty courageously in the face and found it a friend - as duty ever is when we meet it frankly.

Besides the five senses, there is a sixth sense, of equal importance--the sense of duty.

There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it - it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it - you don't know what right is and you're not a man.

He who lives only to benefit himself confers on the world a benefit when he dies.

Human beings place their desires ahead of the collective good.

Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?

It is the duty of man to raise up man.

And if the great fear had not come upon me, as it did, and forced me to do my duty, I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all, even with the memory of so great a vision in me.

I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

Liberals worry that what's best for the individual might not be better for the public at large. But that philosophy assumes something vicious about each and every one of us. It assumes we only care about ourselves.