“Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr , book Moral Man and Immoral Society

Source: Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), pp. 8-9
Context: 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 which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience. 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 ought 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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 1, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those whi…" by Reinhold Niebuhr?

Reinhold Niebuhr photo

Reinhold Niebuhr 65

American protestant theologian 1892–1971

Related quotes

“The policy of wisdom is to use that method which involves a minimum of suffering, and which offers a maximum of redemption.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

The Personality of Jesus (1932)
Context: None of the three ways of dealing with social injustice can entirely prevent or remove human suffering. Resistance by violence tends to increase and intensify suffering; inaction or failure to exert effective restraint perpetuates the misery of the victims of crime or exploitation; non-violent coercion likewise often results in suffering. The policy of wisdom is to use that method which involves a minimum of suffering, and which offers a maximum of redemption.

“His fables so brutally imposed, sweated by heart. Their morality is a prison which I don't want to penetrate anymore.”

Paul Éluard (1895–1952) French poet

Paul Éluard on La Fontaine
Attributed by: Ivry, Benjamin (1996). Francis Poulenc, p. 125, 20th-Century Composers series. Phaidon Press Limited. ISBN 071483503X.

“Terrorism thrives on administrative violence and injustice; that is the only atmosphere in which it can thrive and grow. It sometimes follows the example of indiscriminate violence from above; it sometimes, though very rarely, sets it from below. But the power above which follows the example from below is on the way to committing suicide.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

24 July 1909
India's Rebirth

“Want is a master which can sometimes make
A man the gravest sacrilege commit.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Perché il bisogno a dispogliar gli altari
ra' l'uom talvolta, che sel trova avere.
Canto XLIII, stanza 90 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

“A passion for the infinite is daily presented as a sign of moral distinction, when in fact it can only occur in disturbed minds which accord the status of a norm to the very disturbance from which they are suffering.”

Émile Durkheim book Suicide

Suicide (1897)

“This is a lovely world,” he sighed. “And yet it has suffered horror. Sometimes, so-called civilization seems bent on destroying those very things which it is sworn to protect.”

David Brin book The Uplift War

Source: The Uplift War (1987), Chapter 93 (p. 590)

“A principled commitment to democracy offers a way out of this bind which protagonists on both sides of the debate appear not to have noticed.”

Ian Shapiro (1956) American political theorist

"Three ways to Be a democrat" (1994), reprinted in Democracy's Place (1996).

“Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.”

Steven Erikson book Midnight Tides

Source: Midnight Tides (2004)

“[I]f suffering is bad for animals when we cause it, it is also bad for them when other animals cause it. That suffering is bad for those who experience it is not a human prejudice; nor is an effort to prevent wild animals from suffering a moralistic attempt to police the behavior of other animals. Even if we are not morally required to prevent suffering among animals in the wild for which we are not responsible, we do have a moral reason to prevent it, just as we have a general moral reason to prevent suffering among human beings that is independent both of the cause of the suffering and of our relation to the victims. The main constraint on the permissibility of acting on our reason to prevent suffering is that our action should not cause bad effects that would be worse than those we could prevent.”

Jeff McMahan (philosopher) (1954) American philosopher

" The Meat Eaters http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/", The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2010

“If Jesus Christ was the being which those Mythologists tell us he was, and that he came into this world to suffer, which is a word they sometimes use instead of to die, the only real suffering he could have endured, would have been to live. His existence here was a state of exilement or transportation from Heaven, and the way back to his original country was to die. In fine, everything in this strange system is the reverse of what it pretends to be.”

Thomas Paine book The Age of Reason

1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)

Related topics