How to Use altruist in a Sentence
altruist
noun-
Couldn’t the altruists have left well enough alone?
—Dan Piepenbring, Harpers Magazine, 20 Aug. 2025
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As the park’s lamps clicked on and night arrived, so, too, did the stream of altruists.
—John Woodrow Cox, Washington Post, 24 Dec. 2019
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Didn’t effective altruists do a bunch of crimes a few years ago?
—Dylan Matthews, Vox, 18 Nov. 2024
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This is even true of the cold, hard atheists—the effective altruists.
—Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker, 27 Jan. 2026
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Education is the cause most favored by altruists on the list.
—Forbes Press Releases, Forbes, 9 Dec. 2024
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Some effective altruists are worried about these types of issues as humans move toward the stars.
—Nicholas G. Evans, The Conversation, 14 Apr. 2023
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That means that the benefit to the recipient is 100 times greater than the cost to the altruist.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 4 May 2011
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Now no one will trust EAs [effective altruists] and Doomers ever again.
—Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 19 Nov. 2023
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All the world also loves an altruist, someone who gives time, money or assistance to another.
—David P. Barash, WSJ, 6 May 2022
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Effective altruists fret that their movement might, in fact, have very limited appeal.
—The Economist, 2 June 2018
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Even in times of crisis, Bankman-Fried is ever the effective altruist.
—Prem Thakker, The New Republic, 1 Dec. 2022
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Testimony at his trial suggested that his image as an altruist was at least partially a sham.
—Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 27 Mar. 2024
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Making money is hardly a problem in effective altruists’ eyes.
—Nicholas G. Evans, The Conversation, 14 Apr. 2023
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Wang and Singh had also become effective altruists, pledging to donate most of their earnings.
—Sheelah Kolhatkar, The New Yorker, 25 Sep. 2023
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But what if one of them turns out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, someone who pretends to be an altruist but is, in fact, a megalomaniac or a criminal?
—Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker, 13 Feb. 2023
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But to buy the property at current market rates without jacking up rents, even an altruist would have to come up with some unlikely financial wizardry.
—Doug Smith, Los Angeles Times, 12 Dec. 2024
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Extraordinary altruists care deeply about the welfare of others — including those who have no connection to them.
—Stephanie O'Neill, NPR, 26 Dec. 2024
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Bold-face altruists such as Margaret Williams were among those indulging at the admittedly addictive cookie spread.
—Amber Elliott, Houston Chronicle, 17 June 2019
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Inevitably, even effective altruists have to accept a degree of uncertainty about the impact of their donation.
—The Economist, 2 June 2018
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Not that the rest of us are out of luck, but the altruistic urge among bystanders increases the more the victim exhibits these traits and the more the would-be altruist perceives that aid could be effective.
—David P. Barash, WSJ, 6 May 2022
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Altruism is behavior that benefits someone other than the altruist.
—Lynn Johnson, National Geographic, 3 Jan. 2018
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Effective altruists were once primarily concerned with near-term issues like global poverty and animal welfare.
—Kevin Roose, New York Times, 11 July 2023
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Many effective altruists are skeptical of the speed of today’s AI development and have long called for regulation to guide it.
—Jared Perlo, NBC news, 19 Mar. 2026
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On average, organ donors scored higher on empathy, and effective altruists scored higher on reflective reasoning – slowing down and thinking things through.
—Stylianos Syropoulos, The Conversation, 2 Dec. 2025
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An effective altruist looks to data to decide where and when to donate to a cause, basing the decision on impersonal goals like saving the most lives, or creating the most income, per dollar donated.
—Steven Ehrlich, Forbes, 6 Oct. 2021
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Our results confirm that natural selection favours altruist genes that are increasingly accurate in targeting altruism to only their copies.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 23 Sep. 2010
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Several altruists on the list chose to direct their donations to advance higher education and research, especially in AI.
—Rana Wehbe Watson, Forbes, 29 Nov. 2023
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Like utilitarians, effective altruists want to maximize happiness in the universe.
—Nicholas G. Evans, The Conversation, 14 Apr. 2023
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On one side stood the effective altruist faction, to which former board member Helen Toner subscribed, that worries about a doomsday-like scenario where AI could destroy the world.
—Kylie Robison, Fortune, 12 Dec. 2023
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Some of the effective altruists will classify all of the effective accelerationists as extreme libertarians.
—Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic, 21 Aug. 2024
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'altruist.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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