Ezra Taft Benson Quotes

Our true passions are selfish.

Selfishness is one of the more common faces of pride. 'How everything affects me' is the center of all that matters - self-conceit, self-pity, worldly self-fulfillment, self-gratification, and self-seeking.

I have no reason to influence people. I just want to have it all for myself. I just want someone to pat me on the back. (laugh) It's crazy. It seems just completely ridiculous. I don't know why. I mean, three years ago, I wouldn't be able to influence my dog to walk.

Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.

As a human, I am flawed in that it is difficult for me to consider others before myself. It feels like I have to fight against this force, this current within me that, more often than not, wants to avoid serious issues and please myself, buy things for myself, feed myself, entertain myself, and all of that.

Ego gets you inches but it doesn't get you impact.

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

For six months I'd do movies and make it all about me. Then the other six months, it's not about me and it doesn't matter what my hair looks like or what anything looks like.

Entitlement is just the grossest kind of human behavior.

Ignoring the source of creation and trying to conduct your life yourself is a terribly egoistic and ignorant attitude towards life.

It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.

Many said selfishness was the flaw of our modern age; but then self-conceit emerged from a corner of the deepest hell to join selfishness.

We're into an age of excessive individuals, all right. We're into the age were independence, autonomy, convenience, sometimes selfishness. The new trinity of me, myself and I, seems to dominate. We know that's contrary to the very nature of the human person. The very nature of the human person needs God and needs other people.

Pride does not look up to God and care about what is right. It looks sideways to man and argues who is right. Pride is manifest in the spirit of contention. Was it not through pride that the devil became the devil? Christ wanted to serve. The devil wanted to rule. Christ wanted to bring men to where He was. The devil wanted to be above men. Christ removed self as the force in His perfect life. It was not my will, but thine be done

In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.

Vanity is so constantly solicitous of self, that even where its own claims are not interested, it indirectly seeks the aliment which it loves, by showing how little is deserved by others.

Doth any man live more to himself, or less to God, than the proud?

There is no room for God in him who is full of himself.

It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself.

I don't want to be seen as the kind of person who does things and then expects publicity in return.

There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us.

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.

People expect not just songwriters but all personalities to pontificate about their egos - they just wanna see someone talking about themselves constantly. I'm not interested in that.

Pride is essentially competitive in nature. We pit our will against God's.

A lot of self-importance goes on in the fashion industry. I'm not like that.