Quote #12
All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
More from Reinhold Niebuhr
- Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.
- The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: t…
- The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks.
- Human existence is obviously distinguished from animal life by its qualified participation in creation. Within limits it breaks the forms o…
- The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of s…
- The modern man is . . . certain about his essential virtue . . . [and since] he does not see that he has a freedom of spirit which transcen…
- The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.
- The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration a…