Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism.
For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.
An animal that embarks on forming states without greatly restricting egoism will perish.
Of course, we are all egoists. Egoism is so much a part of our humanity.
Every man of action has a strong dose of egoism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be regarded as high qualities if he can make them the means to achieve great ends.
There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine, and I know what is going to come out of it.
Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?
In brief, egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism.
But egoism is more than this. It is the realization by the individual that he is above all institutions and all formulas; that they exist only so far as he chooses to make them his own by accepting them.
There is no word more generally misinterpreted than the word egoism, in its modern sense.
