David Hume Quotes

The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.

Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality.

It's so easy to be selfish in your 20s and not want to sacrifice.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors - between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

Namely, if I am challenging the base of all these institutions, I'm challenging the moral code of altruism. The precept that man's moral duty is to live for others. That man must sacrifice himself to others. Which is the present day morality.

Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist.

But the bottom line is that, as humans, we are by nature selfish creatures. The only way we care about anything, really, is by making it about us.

I'll do what I can to promote the greater good. If you can harm one person to save 1,000, I'm gonna do it every f**king time.

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

All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad.

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

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.

In brief, egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism.

There's no such thing as altruism.

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.

I was taught in school that I have to look out for number one. That was against everything that I intuitively felt.

Short-sighted is the philosophy which counts on selfishness as the master motive of human action.

It seems that the world considers whoever gets benefit is the virtuous one

The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself.

People always choose self-preservation over the greater good, most of the time, with the belief that self-preservation is the greater good.

Majority of minds are warped into the belief of the only person worth helping is themself.

Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. ... To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism.

Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.