Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 18, “One-Sided Conversation” (p. 176)
“As our self-interests differ, so do our feelings.”
Comme nos intérêts, nos sentiments diffèrent.
Cornélie, act V, scene ii.
La Mort de Pompée (The Death of Pompey) (1642)
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Analysis of Oppression (1955), p. 141
Context: The common run of moralists complain that man is moved by his private self-interest: would to heaven it were so! Private interest is a self-centered principle of action, but at the same time restricted, reasonable and incapable of giving rise to unlimited evils. Whereas, on the other hand, the law of all activities governing social life, except in the case of primitive communities, is that here one sacrifices human life — in himself and in others — to things which are only means to a better way of living. This sacrifice takes on various forms, but it all comes back to the question of power. Power, by definition, is only a means; or to put it better, to possess a power is simply to possess means of action which exceed the very limited force that a single individual has at his disposal. But power-seeking, owing to its essential incapacity to seize hold of its object, rules out all consideration of an end, and finally comes, through an inevitable reversal, to take the place of all ends. It is this reversal of the relationship between means and end, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for all that is senseless and bloody right through history. Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men — oppressed and oppressors alike — the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels.
“In the race of life, always back self-interest; at least you know it's trying.”
Fickle fate: Labor keeping an eye out for goddess Fortuna http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/fickle-fate-labor-keeping-an-eye-out-for-goddess-fortuna-20130609-2ny82.html, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 June 2013
“Altruism is masked self-interest. Aggressive self-interest is a masked urge to self-destruction.”
Source: The Forge of God (1987), Chapter 52 (p. 352)
2002, "When select phrases are lifted and distorted out of context", 2002
Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), pp.85-86
From a speech he delivered in Bankstown, New South Wales on the 24th of February 1993
Source: http://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1993-paul-keating
The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)
