6 Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes on Society

Reinhold Niebuhr quotes on society

1. Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

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

10. 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.

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

13. The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code with make the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscious. They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit. The fact that the hypocrisy of man's group behavior... expresses itself not only in terms of self-justification but in terms of moral justification of human behavior in general, symbolizes one of the tragedies of the human spirit: its inability to conform its collective life to its individual ideals. As individuals, men believe they out to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.

16. The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries. Historical communities are, in short, more deeply involved in nature and time than the individual.