Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature - opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.
Abraham Lincoln
To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.
Adam Smith
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
How sick one gets of being 'good', how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.
Alice James
Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness.
Alveda King
As a dancer, I know couples that have stayed married but separated to dance on different continents. Dance in general, but ballet in particular, is such a finite career. You can't do it later in life, and it's something that I think a dancer has to have some selfishness to fulfill.
Amanda Schull
Modesty and unselfishness - these are the virtues which men praise - and pass by.
Andre Maurois
We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
Fellas, if you find a good woman, don't be scared of commitment. It is good for you. It causes you to grow up and deal with your selfishness like nothing else.
Andy Mineo
As a father now, I wouldn't do what my dad did, because it left me feeling emotionally unstable as a kid. But he didn't do the things he did out of selfishness or malice.
Anthony Kiedis
Selfishness is a quality and not necessarily a bad thing.
Arjen Robben
My team at Pittsburgh is the greatest example of unselfishness and giving of oneself. They bought into that, and it's brought those kids championships, and it's brought all those kids so much glory.
Ben Howland
One of the biggest things we have to be able to do is to handle conflict and handle it correctly. We're able to look at our biases, look at our frustration, look at our sin in this area, our pride and our selfishness. It allows us to move forward.
Benjamin Watson
The poison of selfishness destroys the world.
Catherine of Siena
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Cesare Pavese
Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton
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.
Chris Adami
If you're going to preach dedication, work ethic, teamwork, unselfishness, and being part of a team to accomplish a common goal, you have to live it - you can't just talk about it.
Chris Mullin
I think it's really important to have a vision of teamwork, team play, and unselfishness.
I believe that the writers of Genesis had detected the inherent selfishness in human nature that I propose is in our genes, and invented the myth of original sin to account for it. It's an image. I am not acting as an exegete - I don't interpret scripture.
Christian de Duve
I think for anyone who follows the 'artistic life,' a certain amount of selfishness and self-involvement is part of the package. You're probably already disregarding a certain material life you could have.
There is a quality of selfishness that is associated with an individual when they are in the depths of addiction.
The rising sun can dispel the darkness of night, but it cannot banish the blackness of malice, hatred, bigotry, and selfishness from the hearts of humanity.
Because racism is not like jealousy or selfishness, it is not a primal urge or a basic instinct, it is a 400-year-old political and economic system that has infected our institutions, our culture and even our thinking.
A wise unselfishness is not a surrender of yourself to the wishes of anyone, but only to the best discoverable course of action.
There are probably only a certain number of people who can understand or tolerate how long a job will take and what demands it puts on you. And why should they? It breeds a strange kind of selfishness immersing yourself in a character for so long.
Romance is alive and well in America, but the 50 percent who can't make it work fail because of selfishness. It gets down to that. You can't oversimplify it because every situation is so complex.
Being sorry is the highest act of selfishness, seeing value only after discarding it.
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
It may be a cold, clammy thing to say, but those that treat friendship the same as any other selfishness seem to get the most out of it.
I don't like bullies or selfishness or people who are grumpy.
Prayer must be broad in its scope - it must plead for others. Intercession for others is the hallmark of all true prayer. When prayer is confined to self and to the sphere of one's personal needs, it dies by reason of its littleness, narrowness and selfishness.
Human nature must have come much nearer perfection than it is now, or will be in many generations, to exclude from such a control prejudice, selfishness, ambition, and injustice.
Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.
Childlessness doesn't make people selfish; selfishness makes people selfish.
The sin which is indulged to the greatest extent, which separates us from God and produces so many spiritual disorders, and which are contagious, is selfishness.
We can pay the ecological debt by changing economic models, and by giving up luxury consumption, setting aside selfishness and individualism, and thinking about the people and the planet Earth.
Selfishness is one of the more common faces of pride. 'How everything affects me' is the center of all that matters - self-conceit, self-pity, worldly self-fulfillment, self-gratification, and self-seeking.
Why do I write? From selfishness. Because this state of liquefied, complex concentration, however faintly and dimly I'm able to perceive it, is the greatest pleasure I know.
Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.
I think that in today's world, by nature, we are all self-centered. And that often leads to selfishness.
'Star Trek' episodes always insisted that humanity is on its bumpy way to what will be a glorious future in the 23rd century, in which we will have left most of our old selfishness - and old hatreds and prejudices - far behind us.
Our enemies are our evil deeds and their memories, our pride, our selfishness, our malice, our passions, which by conscience or by habit pursue us with a relentlessness past the power of figure to express.
We need leadership that can elevate religion and morality to their position of paramount importance and thus eliminate growing selfishness, immorality and materialism.
Everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: Greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees.
If there were more temple work done in the Church, there would be less of selfishness, less of contention, less of demeaning others.
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.
The nuclear family doesn't work. It's very destructive; it grew out of selfishness.
My desire for the part of Mammy was not dominated by selfishness for Hollywood has been good to me and I am grateful.
As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
