A Quote by Edward Abbey

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.

Edward Abbey

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Affront Altruism Be Spontaneous Calculated Charity Should Spontaneous

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Edward Abbey
American - Author
January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989

You seem cynical because you're always talking about that selfish behavior that's dressed up as altruism. It doesn't mean there isn't altruism. It just means that it's harder to make jokes about altruism.

Stephen Colbert

We need more spontaneous compassion and charity.

Glenn L. Pace

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.

Clare Boothe Luce

The only justifiable stopping place for for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.

Peter Singer

True charity is spontaneous and finds its own occasion; it is never the offspring of importunity, nor of emulation.

Hosea Ballou

Charity is unconscious of itself, there is no accumulation first and then distribution. It is like the flower - natural, open, spontaneous.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Effective altruism is the form of altruism in which we bring our rational capacities to bear in order to do the most good that we can.

Peter Singer

Charity should be self-sustainable. That is, it should create more wealth rather than perpetuating the cycle of poverty and dependence. In this sense, the best form of charity would be providing quality education for children and more importantly, building a good character in them.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

While business advertises, charity is taught to beg. While business motivates with a dollar, charity is told to motivate with guilt. While business takes chances, charity is expected to be cautious. We measure the success of businesses over the long term, but we want our gratification in charity immediately. We are taught that a return on investment should be offered for making consumer goods, but not for making a better world.

Dan Pallotta

When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.

Muhammad Yunus

Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.

Aurora Levins Morales

It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation.

Richard Dawkins

The guiding motive of mankind should be charity towards men, charity towards all animals.

Swami Vivekananda

Acknowledging someone is an act of altruism in the first place, so converting that act of altruism into a pizza party or company fleece jacket or a gift card is fine, but it's not in keeping with spirit in which it all began.

Charles Best

Which is more subversive-and corrosive-to believe in altruism or to see it simply as a cloak of self interest? Even if altruism did not exist, it would be necessary to believe in it. Pessimists in power are prone to despotism.

Frank Prochaska

A Quote by Edward Abbey

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