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About this quote

What does it mean?
The instinct to survive often transforms into a desire for control and dominance over others.
In plain terms
Living turns into wanting power over others.
What can you take from it?
Survival instincts can become dangerous power drives.

Where it applies

  • leadership
  • conflict
  • personal ambition

Putting it to work

  • monitoring motives
  • checking dominance
  • serving others

Questions to consider

  • When does survival become power?
  • How do you use your power?

Another view

Survival is not always about power.

More from Reinhold Niebuhr

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

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  2. The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to i…

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  3. While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than…

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