Bono Quotes

The commonest weakness of our race is our ability to rationalize our most selfish purposes.

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.

Human reason can excuse any evil.

Remember: Greed is a bad color on a person.

That spirit of freedom, which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed everything to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided, and every selfish passion has taken its place. It is not the public, but private interest, which influences the generality of mankind, nor can the Americans any longer boast an exception. Under these circumstances it would rather have been surprising if you had succeeded.

Greed, greed, greed. That’s the fundamental problem of mankind. If we can solve that problem, the rest of man’s problems would follow. The only thing that can undermine our free society is greed.

Nothing brings out the lower traits of human nature like office seeking. Men of good character and impulse are betrayed by it into all sorts of meanness. Disappointment makes them unjust to the last degree.

When a man makes his personal interests the mainspring of his life and he is greedy to make use of everything that can benefit him, he naturally enters into conflict with other persons, acting also in their own interests, hence the disagreements that can become a hundred years old, and drive whole generations to a mutual hate..

It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it;

The punters [gamblers] know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive nature away from the heart of man.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

There is something about prosperity that brings out the worst in some people.

It's man's nature to abuse knowledge and power, be it in the realm of science, government, or Wall Street. Take God out of the picture, and you have real trouble.

The human mind has infinite capacity to rationalize, and evil characters just push that boundary a bit. Whatever they're doing, they think it makes sense to do it, and they think they have a good reason to do it. In short, they feel justified.

One is never wholly conscious of the greed hidden in one's heart until one hears the sweet sound of silver.

In the race of men is much greed and envy; but of truth, little.

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.

We are all as God made us and frequently much worse.

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.

Wine displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.

When we look into the human heart we see the lust, the greed, the hate, the pride, the anger, and the jealousies that are so destructive. This is at the heart of the human predicament, and the Scriptures call this condition sin.

There isn't a definite right and wrong anyway. Sometimes we do what seems wrong, but we have good reasons for doing it, so it's not wrong after all.

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior.