“Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites. The selfish person does not love himself too much but too little; in fact he hates himself. This lack of fondness and care for himself, which is only one expression of his lack of productiveness, leaves him empty and frustrated. He is necessarily unhappy and anxiously concerned to snatch from life the satisfactions which he blocks himself from attaining. He seems to care too much for himself but actually he only makes an unsuccessful attempt to cover up and compensate for his failure to care for his real self…. It is true that selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.”

Erich Fromm Man for Himself

“it is not probable that a man who is careless in small matters is careful in large ones; quite the contrary, a man who cannot even copy a sentence of Keynes’s correctly is not likely to be a reliable reporter of complicated or badly expressed ideas.”

George Stigler "On Scientific Writing” in The Intellectual and the Market Place and Other Essays [in support of a proposal that someone undertake a large-scale random verification of statements of empirical fact and of quotations from other writers in published economic articles]

“He shall die a flea’s death.”

William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

“Tourism was the source of history’s original failure of cultural understanding. Cyril Aldred writes that ancient Greek and Roman vacationers in Egypt ‘never really understood Egyptian religion and were inclined to see in inexplicable acts and beliefs a more profound significance than actually existed.’ Thus the concept of the ‘inscrutable Orient,’ the idea of the ‘mysterious East.’”

P.J. O’Rourke in The Atlantic Monthly September 2002

“Political conflict, domestic or international, is rooted in the nature of man. It is a reflection of his finitude, his moral weakness, and his irrationality.”

Ernest W. Lefever Ethics and United States Foreign Policy

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one’s uniqueness, one falls in love with one’s complexity.”

John Fowles in Daniel Martin Chapter 2 according to en.wikiquote.org [a friend had cited a slightly different version from memory at a dinner].

“‘If he is dead to-day,’ he [Phocion to a tumultuous Athenian crowd following a rumour that Alexander the Great had died] said, ‘he will be so to-morrow and the day after to-morrow equally. So that there is no need to take counsel hastily or before it is safe.’”

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives II