Reinhold Niebuhr - Social Quotes

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All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.

Reinhold Niebuhr
The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.

Reinhold Niebuhr
Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

Reinhold Niebuhr
The modern man is... certain about his essential virtue... [and since] he does not see that he has a freedom of spirit which transcends both nature and reason... [he] is unable to understand the real pathos of his defiance of nature's and reason's laws. He always imagines himself betrayed into this defiance either by some accidental corruption in his past history or by some sloth of reason. Hence he hopes for redemption, either through a program of social reorganization or by some scheme of education.

Reinhold Niebuhr
Even as rigorous a determinist as Karl Marx, who at times described the social behaviour of the bourgeoisie in terms which suggested a problem in social physics, could subject it at other times to a withering scorn which only the presupposition of moral responsibility could justify.

Reinhold Niebuhr
We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.

Reinhold Niebuhr
Marxism was the social creed and the social cry of those classes who knew by their miseries that the creed of the liberal optimists was s snare and a delusion... Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the "children of light." Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest.

Reinhold Niebuhr
To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.

Reinhold Niebuhr