Robert Nozick Quotes

There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall social good covers this up.

It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.

You have tremendous flexibility in defining both the greater good and the greater community. If you don't succeed in this, then you will continue to pull that heavy wagon up the mountain, and despite the fact that you are pulling it, it will somehow run over your own foot.

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

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in which our personal selves are wrapped up.

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.

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

Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly ever of the public interest.

We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community...Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own

The self-bound individual always forgets that his self would be safeguarded better and automatically the more he prepares himself for the welfare of mankind, and that in this respect no limits are set for him.

Upon the principles of reason, the good of many is preferable to the good of a few or of one; a lasting good is to be preferred before a temporary, the public before the private.

An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members.

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 try to persuade people to act in ways that are not only in their own interest, but in the interest of society at large.

Some of us learned in a school of philosophy which taught that all was for the common good and nothing for oneself and have never, in any case, regarded the pursuit of happiness as anything other than an aberration of the human spirit.

Ants are good citizens, they place group interests first.

Private passions tire and exhaust themselves, public ones never.

No man ever freely surrendered a portion of his own liberty for the sake of the public good; such a chimera appears only in fiction. If it were possible, we would each prefer that the pacts binding others did not bind us; every man sees himself as the centre of all the world's affairs.

Every man is to be considered in two capacities, the private and public; as designed to pursue his own interest, and likewise to contribute to the good of others.

Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society.

In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.

A society that is all self-interest and no comradeship is not a society at all. But a society that is all comradeship and no self-interest is also not a society; it is a sect - or, on the largest scale, totalitarianism.

Throughout America's young history there has been a necessary tension between the individual and the group.

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