A Quote by William Dean Howells

The difficulty is to know conscience from self-interest.

William Dean Howells

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Conscience Difficulty Interest Know Self Self-Interest

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William Dean Howells
American - Novelist
March 1, 1837 - May 11, 1920

Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide with the self-interest of the rest of the world. That's inevitable.

Pankaj Mishra

The guy in the airplane goes with you. So he has self-interest to do the good things, too, and I don't know of any pilots that don't have a self-interest in staying alive.

Gordon Bethune

There is an ongoing battle between conscience and self-interest in which, at some point, we have to take sides.

Robert Breault

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

Vernon Howard

One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.

Joseph Brodsky

You know policy is driven purely in self interest. The Federal Reserve Bank and the commercial banks and the Wall Street banks are not acting in the interests of the population at large, they're acting purely in their own self-interest, which is a shame because they're actions dictate the reality for 300 million Americans. But they don't see it that way, they see it only as a way to preserve their own self-interest.

Max Keiser

I sense that, without sensitivity to physical pain and pleasure, man would not have known self-interest, and consequently know just or unjust acts. Thus, physical sensitivity and self-interest are the authors of all justice.

Jonathan Balcombe

But what of the voice and judgment of conscience? The difficulty is that we have a conscience behind our conscience, an intellectual one behind the moral. ... We can see quite well that our opinions of what is noble and good, our moral valuations, are powerful levers where action is concerned; but we must begin by refining these opinions and independently creating for ourselves new tables of values.

Georg Brandes

Creative capitalism takes this interest in the fortunes of others and ties it to our interest in our own fortunes in ways that help advance both. This hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others can serve a much wider circle of people than can be reached by self-interest or caring alone.

Bill Gates

There is no self-interest completely unrelated to others' interests. Due to the fundamental interconnectedness which lies at the heart of reality, your interest is also my interest. From this it becomes clear that "my" interest and "your" interest are intimately connected. In a deep sense, they converge.

Dalai Lama

A pivotal spiritual attribute is that of self-mastery-th e strength to place reason over appetite. Self-mastery builds a strong conscience. And your conscience determines your moral responses in difficult, tempting, and trying situations.

Russell M. Nelson

Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.

Allan Bloom

We need to graduate from the ridiculous notion that greed is some kind of elixir for capitalism - it's the downfall of capitalism. Self-interest, maybe, but self-interest run amok does not serve anyone. The core value of conscious capitalism is enlightened self-interest. As Jim Cramer on CNBC says, "Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered."

Patricia Aburdene

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?

Milton Friedman

Whenever there is a conflict between universal principles and self-interest, self-interest is likely to prevail.

George Soros

Ultimately, and I believe this is one of the fundamental problems with socialism, it's that human beings do have self-interest. It's very hard to ignore that self-interest when you're creating a government structure.

Trish Regan

A Quote by William Dean Howells

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