Lawrence B. Lindsey Quotes

It is the liberal philosophy, not the conservative one, that views humans as selfish automatons.

I guess because I'm a liberal I think it's not people's natural instinct to be completely self-interested.

Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.

You only live once. Trying to do the right thing for other people often doesn't work out, and you have to follow your own path in order to make things work out best for everyone.

I don't know why we choose to reach out to help another person, or why we decide that we can't, and withdraw and try to care only for ourselves, but I'm fascinated by that choice.

There would be no supporting life were we to feel quite as poignantly for others as we do for ourselves.

I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.

What each man feared would happen to himself, did not trouble him when he saw that it would ruin another.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

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

I fundamentally believe that people have a genuine desire to be positively engaged in the world around them.

Without love, we are not free from our own self interest.

It has always seemed strange to me. The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.

The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

The major forces in human nature: self interest and caring for others

There is some pretty powerful self-interest in wanting a future that is not just running storm-to-storm. The argument that I make is not that we aren't competitive and selfish and greedy. We are. We're all of these things. We're complicated, competitive, greedy and nasty, and kind and generous and compassionate.

There is a difference between being self-interested and being selfish. I will never be selfish.

Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.

Much benevolence of the passive order may be traced to a disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself.

Human beings are struggling, and so they are egoists. But it's wrong to say that they are wholy cruel - it's a deformed view.

Kindness is wisdom. There is none in life But needs it and may learn.

In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends; While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us.

I think service to others is the real key to winning our own personal freedom and the road to our own happiness, our own personal contentment and fulfillment.

In nothing do humans approach so nearly to the gods as doing good to others.