Quotes & Sayings About Human Nature Selfish

Man is a rebel, and a rebel is naturally in confusion. He is in conflict with every other rebel. For a rebel by his very nature is selfish. He is seeking his own good and not the good of others. — Billy Graham

Capitalism satisfied the Christian demand for an institution that channels selfish human desire toward the betterment of society. Some critics accuse capitalism of being a selfish system, but the selfishness is not in capitalism - it is in human nature. — Dinesh D'Souza

Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

War seems to be ingrained in human nature, and even to be regarded as something noble to which man is inspired by his love of honor, without selfish motives. — Immanuel Kant

Man is known to be a selfish, as well as a social being. — James Madison

Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses. — Reinhold Niebuhr

The dread of a permanently wicked human nature takes two forms. One is a practical fear: that social reform is a waste of time because human nature is unchangeable. The other is a deeper concern, which grows out of the Romantic belief that what is natural is good. According to the worry, if scientists suggest it is "natural" - part of human nature - to be adulterous, violent, ethnocentric, and selfish, they would be implying that these traits are good, not just unavoidable. — Steven Pinker

I do not think men are good at all. I have seen enough to know that humans are a wicked race from their very birth. Selfishness defines us. Greed and lust motivate us. And even the best man who ever lived would lie to preserve his own life or beliefs. No, mankind is far from being essentially good. It takes exceptional individuals to change the world, to make a difference. Give the average person a choice, and he will make life miserable for others if only it will make his own life easier. — Brondt Kamffer

There is a special purpose in nature for every being, and that purpose is to live in the fullness of your own creativity. As you are released into this fulfillment, you will know nothing but great joy and love. If every being does what it should be doing, working and sharing for the growth and good of all, it will live in the highest of its energy levels. If human beings get too caught up in their own selves and their own selfish fulfillments, they lose the sense of joy and accomplishment that comes with being in tune and in touch with all aspects of nature. — Rosalind McKnight

There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers ... even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it. — Abraham Maslow

I say you don't need religion, or political ideology, to understand human nature. Science reveals that human nature is greedy and selfish, altruistic and helpful. — Michael Shermer

Human nature was such that individuals could respond to reason, to the call of justice, and even to the love perfection of the religious spirit, but nations, corporations, labor unions, and other large social groups would always be selfish. — Taylor Branch

When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observation about what a lot of people who were happy with themselves seem to have done, namely:
1. Take a careful inventory of their shortcomings and flaws
2. Adopt a code of values that treats these things as virtues
3. Admire themselves for living up to it
Brutal people admire themselves for being manly; compulsive pedants admire themselves for their attention to detail; naturally selfish and mean people admire themselves for their dedication to helping the market reward talent and punish failure, and so on. — John R. Perry

A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others ... thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people's rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish. — C.S. Lewis

I agree with Rand that human nature is selfish, that we should help ourselves first and foremost ... Where I differ with her is that I think we can and should help ourselves and others at the same time as a conscious goal. — Robert Peate

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature. — John Von Neumann

Man is an extremely complex creature: he usually acts in an unselfish manner for selfish reasons. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The unity of Nigeria will only come if we overcome and overgrow tribe, materialism and selfish human nature. — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another. — Steven Pinker

The error I found in the philosophy of Henry George was its cocksureness, its simplicity, and the small value that it placed upon the selfish motives of men. The doctrine was a hang-over from the seventeenth century in France, when the philosophers had given up the idea of God, but still thought that there must be some immovable basis for man's conduct and ideals. In this dilemma they evolved the theory of natural rights. If 'natural rights' means anything it means that the individual rights are to be determined by the conduct of Nature. But Nature knows nothing about rights in the sense of human conception. — Clarence Darrow

Human beings are selfish by nature. Everything that happens to a child, you immediately grab your own child and say, "I will never let that happen to you." — John Darnielle

Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers. — Eleanor Catton

And hence it is, that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety. As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us. — Adam Smith

People who think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic, among them influential political leaders and businessmen as well as go-getters and hustlers of smaller caliber, tend to take it for granted that human nature is selfish and that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. According to this philosophy, the basic law by which man must live, in spite of his surface veneer of civilization, is the law of the jungle. The "fittest" are those who can bring to the struggle superior force, superior cunning, and superior ruthlessness. — S.I. Hayakawa

The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. It's good to realize, though, that if biologists never stop talking of competition, this doesn't mean they advocate it, and if they call genes selfish, this doesn't mean that genes actually are. Genes can't be any more "selfish" than a river can be "angry," or sun rays "loving." Genes are little chunks of DNA. At most, they are "self-promoting," because successful genes help their carriers spread more copies of themselves. — Frans De Waal