“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)
“I often had occasion to remind myself in years to come that self-interest isn't a principle- it's just self-interest.”
Page 101
2000s, (2008)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "I often had occasion to remind myself in years to come that self-interest isn't a principle- it's just self-interest." by Clarence Thomas?
Clarence Thomas 100
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States 1948Related quotes
“The cloven-foot of self-interest was now and then to be seen aneath the robe of public principle.”
John Galt (novelist)
(1779–1839) British writer
The Provost (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1822) p. 20.
“It's interesting, isn't it?… the chandelier… it reminds me of mushroom soup.”
Tennessee Williams
(1911–1983) American playwright
Lawrence M. Schoen
(1959) American writer and klingonist
Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 18, “One-Sided Conversation” (p. 176)
Simone Weil
(1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist
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.
Robert Menzies
(1894–1978) Australian politician, 12th Prime Minister of Australia
Election speech, Canterbury, Victoria, 29 October, 1958 https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1958-robert-menzies
Second Term as Prime Minister (1949-1966)
“To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.”
Walter Pater
(1839–1894) essayist, art and literature critic, fiction writer
Source: Marius the Epicurean http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/8mrs110.txt (1885), Ch. 6
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”
James Clear
(1986) American author and speaker
Source: https://twitter.com/JamesClear/status/1059504530130395136