Quote #7

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

More from Reinhold Niebuhr

  1. While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and …
  2. The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.
  3. The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we …
  4. The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of s…
  5. [R]eason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
  6. 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.
  7. Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even whe…
  8. Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.

All Reinhold Niebuhr quotes