A Quote by Peter Breggin

Love is the most ethically consistent experience, because selfishness and altruism no longer seem opposed or in conflict.

Peter Breggin

Quote Topics

Altruism Because Conflict Consistent Experience Longer Love Love Is Most Opposed Seem Selfishness

Quote Author

Peter Breggin
American - Psychiatrist
Born: May 11, 1936

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

My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.

Douglas Coupland

The Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story — and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.

J. R. R. Tolkien

True happiness comes from having a sense of inner peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved by cultivating altruism, love and compassion, and by eliminating anger, selfishness and greed.

Dalai Lama

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the creative light of altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life's persistent and most urgent question is 'What are you doing for others?'

Martin Luther

Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.

Christina Stead

People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.

Ludwig von Mises

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

Loyalty cannot be too liberally insisted upon. Altruism in nature remains an exception. It poses a puzzle, being in prima facie conflict with the survival of the fittest and most selfish.

Peter Birks

Love is not selective, desire is selective. In love there are no strangers. When the centre of selfishness is no longer, all desires for pleasure and fear of pain cease; one is no longer interested in being happy; beyond happiness there is pure intensity, inexhaustible energy, the ecstasy of giving from a perennial source.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.

Ayn Rand

It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.

Richard Dawkins

In one degree or another we all struggle with selfishness. Since it is so common, why worry about selfishness anyway? Because selfishness is really self-destruction in slow motion.

Neal A. Maxwell

Most parents hate to experience conflict, are deeply troubled when it occurs, and are quite confused about how to handle it constructively. Actually, it would be a rare relationship if over a period of time one person's needs did not conflict with the other's. When any two people (or groups) coexist, conflict is bound to occur just because people are different, think differently, have different needs and wants that sometimes do not match.

Thomas Gordon

Forgiveness is the most effective way of dealing with arguments; altruism and forgiveness bring humanity together so that no conflict, however serious, will go beyond the bounds of what is truly human.

Dalai Lama

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.