George A. Moore Quotes

I think the dual existence thing is a regular pastime for all human beings, and for that matter anything in this universe.

Dost thou not understand that there are two distinct forces in us, that of the soul and that of the body, that is, a movement and a regulator?

Luckily the whole world is not like me, or else, there would be no world.

We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.

We live in a time when science is validating what humans have known throughout the ages: that compassion is not a luxury; it is a necessity for our well-being, resilience, and survival.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

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

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.

In the affairs of men, there always appears to be a need for at least two things simultaneously, which, on the face of it, seem to be incompatible and to exclude one another. We always need both freedom and order

It is absurd to suppose, if this is God’s world, that men must always be selfish barbarians.

We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it.

The condition of our survival in any but the meagerest existence is our willingness to accommodate ourselves to the conflicting interests of others, to learn to live in a social world.

People are nicer than economists give us credit for. The economists cannot understand why people would work long and hard to clean up a community after a hurricane. … Most economists don’t have any interest in or understanding of psychology.

We're a blip in the existence of the universe, and we're constantly trying to pull each other down. Not doing things to help each other.

I believe that people generally want to be what we call good. They want to cooperate with people. They don't want to steal; they don't want to cheat. But everybody has a price. Everybody has an incentive.

Certainly, hunger can bring out the worst in us. But it can also bring out the best.

When you start to think about the drives that humans have, I think sometimes we find we are simpler than we thought and more easily manipulated.

Everybody's got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

I am still very observant. I am absorbed by people and why they do what they do.

'Hanna' has grown up in wilderness. It highlights humanness and animal-ness in humans. She has an interesting take on gender and love.

When . . . in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?

Macaulay somewhere says, that it is extraordinary that, whereas the laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies, far removed as they are from us, are perfectly well understood, the laws of the human mind, which are under our observation all day and every day, are no better understood than they were two thousand years ago.