Quotes about selfishness

Don’t you find that predators are those who most often assert absolute rights to personal freedoms?

As our sages have said, youth builds a universe with self at the center.

We have been thwarted at every turn by god. Not the real God. A false one which has been set up by man to expedite his destruction of the earth. He is the gobble-god who bids fair to swallow everything in the name of a totally selfish humanity. His ten commandments are me first (let me live as I please), humans first (let all other living things die for my benefit), sperm first (no birth control), birth first (no abortions), males first (no women’s rights), my culture/tribe/language/religion first (separatism/terrorism), my race first (no human rights), my politics first (lousy liberals/rotten reactionaries), my country first (wave the flag, the flag, the flag), and, above all, profit first.

Some can see no farther than their mirrors. What wears another face must go unseen.

“Also, the people who’ve left tended to be those who thought man was more important than other parts of creation, and themselves more important than other men,” Africa mused. “Me-and-my-image devotees. Human fertility worshippers. The kind of people who will happily kill other species to make room for more humans, advocates of the old ‘fill up the world and ruin it’ philosophy.”

No one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them!

Pretty woman, he thought. Pretty little black-skinned woman. Who wanted to kill for love, die for love. The pride, the conceit of these doormat women amazed him. They were always women who had been spoiled children. Whose whims had been taken seriously by adults and who grew up to be the stingiest, greediest people on earth and out of their stinginess grew their stingy little love that ate everything in sight. They could not believe or accept the fact that they were unloved; they believed that the world itself was off balance when it appeared as though they were not loved. Why did they think they were so lovable? Why did they think their brand of love was better than, or even as good as, anybody else's? But they did. And they loved their love so much they would kill anybody who got in its way.

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.

Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world.

The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead.

“Each of us remains convinced that our own subjective viewpoint is more urgent than anyone else’s—indeed, even more valid than the objective matrix that underlies so-called reality. After all, the subjective view is a grand theater. To be hero of an ongoing drama. It’s why ideologies and bigotries survive against all evidence or logic.

“Subjective obstinacy had advantages, Morris, when we were busy evolving into nature’s champion egotists. It led to human mastery over the planet…and to our species nearly wiping itself out.”