“I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else.”
Source: The Blind Assassin
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Margaret Atwood 348
Canadian writer 1939Related quotes

“I do not like work even when someone else is doing it.”

Audio lectures, Decadence and the New Age (March 10, 1989)

Source: Eleven Minutes (2003), p. 97.
Context: In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
“Do Something Nice for Someone Else — and Don't Tell Anyone About It”
Title of Lesson 8
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all Small Stuff (1997)

"Copying Is Not Theft: Against Copyright Tyranny (by Nina Paley)" (25 March 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2p_BAjC7C8#t=25m21s<!-- Retrieved 27 February 2013 -->
Context: You don't deserve to be paid because you choose to do something that somebody else may, or may not, want. If you want to be paid for your work, you negotiate that beforehand. Otherwise I would just be walking around talking. Here I am talking now. "You owe me money", right? … It's up to you whether or not you want to do work with no contract. I think artists do need to do work with no contract, because what we're motivated by is not money. We're motivated by a need to express ourselves and to get our ideas out. That's the motivation. It turns out that when people like it they frequently will support you if you give them a means, but this is not a contract.

“In America, we like everyone to know about the good work we're doing anonymously.”
Said on a 2008 episode (12.7) of British motoring program Top Gear.
Miscellaneous

Quoted in Clarence P. Dresser, "Vanderbilt in the West" New York Times (9 October 1882). Dresser's account has Vanderbilt denying that he ran a particular passenger express service for the public benefit, but rather to drive down prices of a competing Pennsylvania Railroad service. By some accounts Dresser fabricated the interview except for the first sentence, which Vanderbilt said in refusing to give an interview. See "Reporter C. P. Dresser Dead", New York Times (25 April 1891).
Disputed