Top 35 Altruism Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Altruism Quotes from famous people such as Richard Grenell, Guy Standing, David Rakoff, Ayn Rand, Karen Salmansohn, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Altruism, especially involving basic freedoms, can be w

Altruism, especially involving basic freedoms, can be what shareholders value most.
Richard Grenell
Politicians should reflect on the well-documented fact that fearful, insecure people lose their sense of tolerance and altruism.
Guy Standing
Chronically insecure people easily lose their altruism, tolerance, and respect for non-conformity. If they have no alternative on offer, they can be led to attribute their plight to strangers in their midst.
Guy Standing
Altruism is innate, but it’s not instinctual. Everybody’s wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.
David Rakoff
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ayn Rand
Altruism raises your mood because it raises your self-esteem, which increases happiness. Plus, giving to others gets you outside of yourself and distracts you from your problems.
Karen Salmansohn
Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
Nicholson Baker
I don’t deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn’t because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.
B. F. Skinner
Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.
Alan Dershowitz
Social motherliness has made women’s struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism.
Ellen Key
We, all of us, could do a much better job of evoking what someone has called the universal principle of human altruism: the urge in us all to help others who are in danger.
Bart Starr
One of the great issues in biology is the origin of altruism – of why you would do something for someone else that could hurt you – and Darwin posited that it might be rooted in maternal instinct, in sacrificing yourself for your children.
Isabella Rossellini
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
E. O. Wilson
Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.
Jonathan Sacks
Altruism is one of the most fundamentally social impulses, and doing things for others without expecting anything in return is core to what makes us human. This is why, from the day Facebook Platform launched in 2007, Causes has been honored to be one of the most popular applications, with over 140 million users.
Joe Green
I have spent over 50 years preaching and teaching the values of peace, mutual respect and altruism.
Fethullah Gulen
Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.
Jonathan Haidt
I am an actress, I earn money, I am well-known. I don’t think it is altruism to become engaged in humanitarian work. It’s the least one can do.
Emmanuelle Beart
There’s no such thing as altruism.
Andrew Tobias
Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good… There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.
Jonathan Sacks
In brief, egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism.
John Buchanan Robinson
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.
Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise.
Isabella Rossellini
I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one.
Aneurin Bevan
For many years, I tried to make New Year’s resolutions. I made lists and shot for great heights: I would show altruism and exert moral strength, patience and all those other great attributes.
Henry Rollins
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
Richard Dawkins
Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.
Steven Pinker
It’s actually more than 700 case studies that show that, especially in times of crisis, we show our best selves. And we get this explosion of altruism and cooperation. This happens again and again after natural disasters, after earthquakes and after floodings.
Rutger Bregman
We need to build websites with celebrity speakers who talk about the ideals of fairness, sharing, democratic cooperation, and altruism in public life.
Deepak Chopra
Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.
Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould
Acknowledging someone is an act of altruism in the first place, so converting that act of altruism into a pizza party or company fleece jacket or a gift card is fine, but it’s not in keeping with spirit in which it all began.
Charles Best
In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.
E. O. Wilson
Pharmaceutical companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new HIV/AIDS treatments not out of altruism but because they can make up those research costs in sales.
David Mixner
Many of our moments of prosociality, of altruism and Good Samaritanism, are acts of restitution, attempts to counter our antisocial moments.
Robert Sapolsky
The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There’s a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
Alison Gopnik