101 Selfish Gene Quotes
Following is our list of selfish gene quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about human selfishness.
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Famous Selfish Gene Quotes
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. — Richard Dawkins
Group selection posits that groups of organisms can act in an altruistic way, to protect or benefit the group at the individual’s expense. — Valter Longo
Genes can’t talk to their animals, so they control them by having them run on specialized survival software I call the Primitive Mind. — Tim Urban
Scientists have found the gene for shyness. They would have found it years ago, but it was hiding behind a couple of other genes. — Jonathan Katz
Men tend to be selfish. — Caprice Bourret
A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. — Oscar Wilde
It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance. — Lewis Thomas
A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's. — Richard Whately
Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense. — Richard Dawkins
No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. — W. E. B. Du Bois
Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals. — E. O. Wilson
Selfishness is one of the principal fruits of the corruption of human nature; and it is obvious that selfishness disposes us to over-rate our good qualities, and to overlook or extenuate our defects. — William Wilberforce
By self-interest, Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest. — Bertrand Russell
It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise. — Richard Dawkins
A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists. — Max Stirner
Short Selfish Gene Quotes
- Being selfish to me means that you have to look out for yourself and you don't have to sacrifice. — Herbie Mann
- Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. — Oscar Wilde
- A selfish man is a thief. — Jose Marti
- Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self. — Anton Chekhov
- I am selfish, but that's an attribute that all artists possess. — Robert Mapplethorpe
Selfishness Quotes
We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
I'm just the mere shadow of my former selfishness. I crave the silhouette of your kiss. — Elvis Costello
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
Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway. — Mother Teresa
Millennials are often portrayed as apathetic, disinterested, tuned out and selfish. None of those adjectives describe the Millennials I've been privileged to meet and work with. — Chelsea Clinton
Any opposition not based on rationalism or science or experience will one day or other, reveal the fraud, selfishness, lies and conspiracies. — Periyar E. V. Ramasamy
If you are discouraged it is a sign of pride because it shows you trust in your own power. Your self-sufficiency, your selfishness and your intellectual pride will inhibit His coming to live in your heart because God cannot fill what is already full. It is as simple as that. — Mother Teresa
Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance. — Theodore Roosevelt
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. — Thomas Sowell
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes. — Andrew Jackson
Human Selfishness Quotes
Leadership means firmness, not harshness or bullying; understanding, not weakness; justice, not irresponsible freedom; humaneness, not intolerance; generosity, not selfishness; pride, not egotism. — Omar N. Bradley
Ordinary love is selfish, darkly rooted in desires and satisfactions. Divine love is without condition, without boundary, without change. The flux of the human heart is gone forever at the transfixing touch of pure love. — Sri Yukteswar Giri
Go on bravely. Do not expect success in a day or a year. Always hold on to the highest. Be steady. Avoid jealousy and selfishness. Be obedient and eternally faithful to the cause of truth, humanity, and your country, and you will move the world. — Swami Vivekananda
Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity; and let us put aside all selfishness in consideration of language, nationality, or religion. — John Amos Comenius
I want to live in a world where every person gives far more than they take. — Markiplier
An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness. — Clara Barton
Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness. — Alveda King
Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo. — Hilda Doolittle
I would have been a terrible mother because I'm basically a very selfish human being. Not that that has stopped most people going off and having children. — Katharine Hepburn
If it’s you and me against the world, then so be it. — Jay-Z
Selfish Quotes
We all should rise, above the clouds of ignorance, narrowness, and selfishness. — Booker T. Washington
I'm going to be meeting with people today who talk too much - people who are selfish, egotistical, ungrateful. But I won't be surprised or disturbed, for I can't imagine a world without such people. — Marcus Aurelius
If you don't like me, remember it's mind over matter. I don't mind, and you don't matter. — Dr. Seuss
We are all making a crown for Jesus out of these daily lives of ours, either a crown of golden, divine love, studded with gems of sacrifice and adoration, or a thorny crown, filled with the cruel briars of unbelief, or selfishness, and sin. — Aimee Semple McPherson
Cultivate peace first in the garden of your heart by removing the weeds of lust, hatred, greed, selfishness, and jealousy. Then only you can manifest it externally. Then only, those who come in contact with you, will be benefited by your vibrations of peace and harmony. — Sivananda
Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hatred. It is a power that breaks the chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness. — Corrie Ten Boom
All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live. — Swami Vivekananda
Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness. — Napoleon Hill
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
The inescapable fact is that when we build a society based on greed, selfishness, and ruthless competition, the fruits we can expect to reap are economic insecurity at home and international discord abroad. — Tommy Douglas
Selfish Love Quotes
I got a dream that's worth more than my reality. — Big Sean
Eternal Trinity... mystery deep as the sea, You could give me no greater gift than the gift of Yourself. For You are a fire ever burning and never consumed, which itself consumes all the selfish love that fills my being. — St. Catherine of Siena
People are generally irrational, unreasonable and selfish. They deserve to be loved, anyway. — Mother Teresa
Self-care is never a selfish act - it is only good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others. — Parker J. Palmer
Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. — Erich Fromm
Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love. — Mao Zedong
People are unrealistic, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway. — Mother Teresa
Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you. — Karl Lagerfeld
I am in love with girls that are bad and naughty and badass, and a little selfish, but I like to watch from a respectful distance! — Dreama Walker
If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it. — Stephen Colbert
Selfish World Quotes
The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. — Woodrow Wilson
The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. — Abraham Lincoln
Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme. — Nikolai Berdyaev
Love is the key to the mystery. Love by its very nature is not selfish, but generous. It seeks not its own, but the good of others. The measure of love is not the pleasure it gives-that is the way the world judges it-but the joy and peace it can purchase for others. — Fulton J. Sheen
In this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog. — George Graham Vest
Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail. — Thomas Hardy
Meditation is not a selfish thing. Even though you're diving in and experiencing the Self, you're not closing yourself off from the world. You're strengthening yourself, so that you can be more effective when you go back into the world. — David Lynch
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight; build it anyway. — Mother Teresa
The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world. — M. Scott Peck
Mundus vult decipi'—the world wants to be deceived. To live without deception presupposes standards beyond the reach of most people whose existence is largely shaped by compromise, evasion and mutual accommodation. Could they face their weakness, their vanity and selfishness, without a mask? — Abraham Joshua Heschel
People Writing About Selfish Gene
More Selfish Gene Quotes
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
Leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation. — Richard Dawkins
Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. — Richard Dawkins
Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. — Richard Dawkins
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random. — Richard Dawkins
I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. — Richard Dawkins
Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players. — Steven Pinker
People who criticize The Selfish Gene like that often haven't read it. The selfish gene accounts for altruism toward kin and individuals who might be in a position to reciprocate your altruism. — Richard Dawkins
A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness. — Richard Dawkins
They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines. — Richard Dawkins
Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it. — Richard Dawkins
I've always been antagonistic to any naïve application of the selfish gene theory to politics. Some people have attempted to suggest that it means we are selfish or we should be selfish. — Richard Dawkins
Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that. — Charles Jencks
Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. — Richard Dawkins
Nature, red in tooth and claw. — Alfred Lord Tennyson
You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered. — Richard Dawkins
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. — Richard Dawkins
Of course we're all programmed genetically to some extent. But the "selfish gene" thesis doesn't explain everything. — Jane Goodall
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
I think we all have a selfish gene which rises to the top, sometimes. But then we're also all capable of a sudden magnanimity. — Jim Broadbent
I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. — Richard Dawkins
Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language. — Noam Chomsky
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. — Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is a classic example of science fiction. — Pope Benedict XVI
Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old. — 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
Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative. — Matt Ridley
We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. — Richard Dawkins
I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene. — Richard Dawkins
In Conclusion
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