Marilyn vos Savant Quotes

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.

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

The balance between the cooperative and altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close. Under many conditions the cooperative forces lose, In the long run, however, the group centered, more altruistic drives are slightly stronger. ... human altruistic drives are as firmly based on an animal ancestry as is man himself.

In the natural order no matter what ideals may be theoretically possible, most people more or less live for themselves and for their own interests and pleasures or for those of their own family or group, and therefore they are constantly interfering with one another's aims, and hurting one another and injuring one another, whether they mean it or not.

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

The whole history of the world has been the struggle between the selfish and the unselfish.

People always say there is competition in nature, but I think that because we are human, it's not only competition. Because we are human we have something other than competition - sharing, helping others, or being oneself. Competition is really kind of ugly.

Man's triumph will consist in substituting the struggle for existence by a struggle for mutual service.

I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.

We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them.

I believe that the human motive to share is very powerful. The human motive to profit is also very powerful, and I think that the profit motive and the sharing motive are not exclusive.

Human beings place their desires ahead of the collective good.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

The world is so competitive, aggressive, consumive, selfish and during the time we spend here we must be all but that.

We found evolution will punish you if you're selfish and mean. For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn't evolutionarily sustainable.

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.

No man will work for your interests unless they are his.

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.

People are not considerate of others. They tend not to consider themselves as all living together, but see themselves only as individuals.

Fundamentally, American society is composed of individuals who don't go out of their way to do each other favours.

Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.

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.

If you've developed an ideology that what's good for you personally also happens to be good for everyone else, that's quite wonderful because there's no moral tension.

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.