Christopher McDougall Quotes

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

I feel really ambiguous about the psychology of people trying to do good in the world.

Since the 1970s, I have asked students if they would first try to save their drowning dog or a drowning stranger. And for 40 years I have received the same results: One third vote for their dog, one third for the stranger, and one third don't know what they would do.

To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.

We don't woo our wives with clubs. We don't leave old folks on ice floes. And maybe the time has come to quit diving into rip tides to save people we don't know. We've outgrown a lot of survival-of-the-fittest strategies, and risking our lives for strangers might be one of them.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

Americans by nature are more philanthropic than most other people, but hopefully that will change.

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.

Nobody else in the world can do what we can do. And nobody else is willing to do it for altruistic reasons. I mean, we don't go into places like Iraq to grab their oil or colonize their country. We go there to deliver, as George W. Bush said, the blessings of liberty.

He was a patient man, a kind man, a man who cared about animals and human beings, all qualities not to be devalued, but James Herriot was not a saint. I tried so hard to play against some of the scripts that implied that he was a saint, but I don't think I was always altogether successful.

I think every human being has good intentions in one aspect of life and some in every.

I would say that when you do something out of the goodness of your heart, and you don't know what the repercussions will be, you have to live with that. And it can be devastating. Because the intention was there.

It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behavior.

I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.

As human beings we're so cynical, so uncompassionate.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Altruism is innate, but it's not instinctual. Everybody's wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.

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's no such thing as altruism.

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.

I say you don't need religion, or political ideology, to understand human nature. Science reveals that human nature is greedy and selfish, altruistic and helpful.

We are selfish when we are exclusively or predominantly concerned with the good for ourselves. We are altruistic when we are exclusively or predominantly concerned with the good of others.

There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.