Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.

Alan Dershowitz

Alan Dershowitz

Good Yin Without

The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.

Alison Gopnik

Great Youngest Child Youngest

In 'Ozark,' the truism that we are not as likely to do as well as our parents did in the past is front and center.

Alissa Quart

Well Truism T

The daily deluge of tales of lechery and trauma holds a hidden but crucial truism: sexual harassment routinely feeds on income inequality. After all, it's much harder to exploit an equal.

Alissa Quart

Men Equality Truism

There's no such thing as altruism.

Andrew Tobias

Truism Thing Thin

I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one.

Aneurin Bevan

War Sympathy Would

There's a certain truism that you can't be self-conscious in comedy.

Ari Graynor

You Us Truism

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

Ayn Rand

Men Truism To Survive

I don't deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn't because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.

B. F. Skinner

History Use Us

To many American Jews, it is a truism that Barack Obama was the anti-Israel president. It was Mr. Obama who signed the Iran deal, which Israel portrayed as a mortal danger. It was Mr. Obama whose most contentious relationship with a foreign leader was with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Bari Weiss

Relationship Anger Ya

Never forget this simple truism: Forecasting is marketing, plain and simple.

Barry Ritholtz

Truism Tin T

We, all of us, could do a much better job of evoking what someone has called the universal principle of human altruism: the urge in us all to help others who are in danger.

Bart Starr

Anger Who Us

Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don't give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution.

Ben Shapiro

Change You Will

It may be a truism that the country cannot be strong abroad unless it is strong at home, but it's also a fact that the country's economic prosperity depends on its security abroad - not only in the core of the liberal democratic world but often well beyond it, too.

Bret Stephens

Home World Well

Acknowledging someone is an act of altruism in the first place, so converting that act of altruism into a pizza party or company fleece jacket or a gift card is fine, but it's not in keeping with spirit in which it all began.

Charles Best

Car Art Wit

Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that the Ten Commandments are a historical document that contains moral, ethical, and legal truisms that any person of any religion or even an atheist can recognize and appreciate.

Cliff Stearns

Religion Men Legal

Pharmaceutical companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new HIV/AIDS treatments not out of altruism but because they can make up those research costs in sales.

David Mixner

Men Vest Use

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

David Rakoff

Witch Wit Wired

For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself.

Deepak Chopra

Truth Relationship Love

We need to build websites with celebrity speakers who talk about the ideals of fairness, sharing, democratic cooperation, and altruism in public life.

Deepak Chopra

Life Wit Who

I'm my mother's son, so when it comes to altruism and understanding how to do things to benefit a person's life... the women in my life have been much better than the men.

Dustin Lance Black

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

E. O. Wilson

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

E. O. Wilson

Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism.

Ellen Key

I am an actress, I earn money, I am well-known. I don't think it is altruism to become engaged in humanitarian work. It's the least one can do.

Emmanuelle Beart

Jews are frequently compared to the proverbial 'canary in the coal mine,' an enduring signal for when the world is failing to meet its obligations in tackling bigotry. It has never been clearer to me just how widely understood that truism is.

Ephraim Mirvis

It is a truism that children need more of Mother than of money.

Ezra Taft Benson

I have spent over 50 years preaching and teaching the values of peace, mutual respect and altruism.

Fethullah Gulen

It is one of the truisms of politics that a conservative is often enough a former liberal who has been 'mugged by reality.'

Frank Gaffney

Chronically insecure people easily lose their altruism, tolerance, and respect for non-conformity. If they have no alternative on offer, they can be led to attribute their plight to strangers in their midst.

Guy Standing

Politicians should reflect on the well-documented fact that fearful, insecure people lose their sense of tolerance and altruism.

Guy Standing

For many years, I tried to make New Year's resolutions. I made lists and shot for great heights: I would show altruism and exert moral strength, patience and all those other great attributes.

Henry Rollins

Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise.

Isabella Rossellini

One of the great issues in biology is the origin of altruism - of why you would do something for someone else that could hurt you - and Darwin posited that it might be rooted in maternal instinct, in sacrificing yourself for your children.

Isabella Rossellini

When you work at Google and tell these engineers that their skill set is relevant to somebody in Iran who doesn't have access to information in their country or the rest of the world, it really inspires them to want to do something about it. There is a genuine altruism that exists at this company, and that's why I'm here and not anywhere else.

Jared Cohen

Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement which tries to work out the most effective ways to improve the world. Effective altruists - conform to old-school utilitarian principles - consider all causes and actions, and then act in the way that they believe brings about the greatest positive impact.

Jens Martin Skibsted

Altruism is one of the most fundamentally social impulses, and doing things for others without expecting anything in return is core to what makes us human. This is why, from the day Facebook Platform launched in 2007, Causes has been honored to be one of the most popular applications, with over 140 million users.

Joe Green

In brief, egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism.

John Buchanan Robinson

Realistically, it's the great truism that screenwriters are fungible, that at the end of the day a studio is not going to want to fire a movie star. And they're really not going to want to fire a star director because the director has the hand on the tiller of a ship.

John Logan

The defense of ObamaCare's constitutionality relies mainly on the truism that everyone is sure to get sick at some point in their lives, and this makes the health-care market unlike any other market.

John Podhoretz

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

Jonathan Haidt

Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.

Jonathan Sacks

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.

Jonathan Sacks

Altruism raises your mood because it raises your self-esteem, which increases happiness. Plus, giving to others gets you outside of yourself and distracts you from your problems.

Karen Salmansohn

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould

It's a truism to say that my state, Texas, isn't a red state: It's a nonvoting state.

Laura Moser

People and places are the source of my work, both in prose and verse-and this remark is not the truism it seems, for I do not distinguish as sharply between a place and a person as most people seem to do.

Leonard Alfred George Strong

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

Lewis Thomas

It's a truism that you can investigate anything forever.

Louis Freeh

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

Marco Rubio