Adam Grant Quotes

I don't understand when people are being greedy or mean, when they say who should get what, when they get control of someone else's life.

I feel like a lot of people would quite easily stab you in the back once they get what they want. And you see that in people.

The bulk of mankind have indeed, in all countries in their turn, been made the prey of ambition.

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

Resist the temptation to exploit power for personal or group interests.

Beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for the building up of private power.

No man ever ruled other men for their own good.

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests.

… the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes.

It would be a most despicable thing to suggest I would exploit the poor for my own personal gain.

Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me.

You should never bury someone to forward your own personal interest. And I would never do that to anyone else on the planet.

Managers can sometimes hold players back for their own benefit.

It's all about what they can get out of me.

Everybody likes to get as much power as circumstances allow, and nobody will vote for a self-denying ordinance.

Instead of respecting things, we want to use them for ourselves and if it is difficult to use them, we want to conquer them.

He that visits the sick in hopes of a legacy, but is never so friendly in all other cases, I look upon him as being no better than a raven that watches a weak sheep only to peck out its eyes.

Politicians as a class are dangerous, that people who are seeking power over us are not, by definition, our friends.

The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

I have lived too long to cherish many illusions about the essential high-mindedness of men when brought into stark confrontation with the issue of control over their security, and their property interests.

The truth is that neither British nor American imperialism was or is idealistic. It has always been driven by economic or strategic interests.

There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.

As readers, we sense when the game is being played for real and when something else is afoot: pride, showmanship, the pursuit of power, self-aggrandizement, revenge, making money. Not that there's anything wrong with any of that, but I dislike closing a book with the sense that I've been had.

It is a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.