Famous Quotes & Sayings

Anton LaVey

Satanism represents a form of controlled selfishness.

Richard Dawkins

What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.

Richard Dawkins

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

If the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies ... are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention ... The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Richard Dawkins

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation forthe existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Roz Chast

It's almost selfishness, taking care of your mental health. You can't just not do it.

Rose Macaulay

How far does one combine resistance to over-control with social justice, i.e. tolerable living for people in general? We are too selfish to be trusted, if left free, to give away enough to make people comfortable enough to give them a chance. Yet if all this is ordered for us, as to some extent it has to be, it so soon leads to tyranny. It is a very difficult problem. If only human beings had more pity, unselfishness, and justice and didn't need coercion to treat each other decently.

Jason Gardener

It has always been my ambition to win a major outdoor title and that will be the plan at the Commonwealths.

Bruce Davison

I'd like to tell them thank you. Their courage and ambition to get a higher education ... is something I truly admire. It's something I can't picture, but it's something I know happened, and that's why I commend them for doing what they've done.

Marc Jones

He had his pick of schools. But his ambition is to become a top entrepreneur and businessman, and that's why he chose Bentley.

William Law

All the wants which disturb human life, which make us uneasy to ourselves, quarrelsome with others, and unthankful to God, which weary us in vain labors and foolish anxieties, which carry us from project to project, from place to place in a poor pursuit of we don't know what, are the wants which neither God, nor nature, nor reason hath subjected us to, but are solely infused into us by pride, envy, ambition, and covetousness.

William Shenstone

It seems idle to rail at ambition merely because it is a boundless passion; or rather is not this circumstance an argument in its favor? If one would be employed or amused through life, should we not make choice of a passion that will keep one long in play?

Richard Rorty

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.

Werner Herzog

Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It's an ego trip, and I'm not on an ego trip. I don't have ambitions - I have a vision.

Samuel Fuller

Ninety-five per cent of films are born of frustration, of self despair, of ambition for survival, for money, for fattening bank accounts. Five per cent, maybe less, are made because a man has an idea, an idea which he must express.

Wangari Maathai

There will always be people who think that you have ambitions.

Richard Boucher

The purpose of these talks is to get started,

Tim Wulfemeyer

The purpose of new technology is to democratize the system a little bit.

Mark Dutro

I did that on purpose. We were down by two, and I didn't want to see Montrose win here on our track.

Richard Dawkins

We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history.

William S. Burroughs

The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control.

William Matthews

The countenance may be rightly defined as the title page which heralds the contents of the human volume, but like other title pages, it sometimes puzzles, often misleads, and often says nothing to the purpose.

Sarah Brady

There is no personal right to be armed for private purposes unrelated to the service in a well regulated militia.

Sara Gilbert

I like that kind of frantic schedule. It makes me feel like I have a purpose.

Richard Flanagan

The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose is a horror that's very hard to imagine, far less understand.