The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts --the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria --are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.

A wise unselfishness is not a surrender of yourself to the wishes of anyone, but only to the best discoverable course of action.

The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race.

Long before Einstein told us that matter is energy, Machiavelli and Hobbes and other modern political philosophers defined man as a lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of energy called "self-interestedness." This was not a