“Blot out vain pomp; check impulse; quench appetite; keep reason under its own control.”
IX, 7
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IX
“Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.”
Source: (1932), p.29
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Reinhold Niebuhr 65
American protestant theologian 1892–1971Related quotes
“Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.”
Reinhold Niebuhr
(1892–1971) American protestant theologian
Source: (1932), p.25
Howard S. Becker
(1928) American sociologist
Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), pp. 27-28.
"Father Severyan", in November 1916: The Red Wheel: Knot II (1984; translation 1999).
Context: At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. … War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war.
Margaret Cho
(1968) American stand-up comedian
From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, RACISM AND CIVIL RIGHTS
John G. Bennett
(1897–1974) British mathematician and author
J.G. Bennett (1963) " General Systematics http://www.systematics.org/journal/vol1-1/GeneralSystematics.htm" in: Systematics] (1963) Vol 1., no 1. p. 5; cited on The Primer Project on isss.org, 2007.07.03
“A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.”
Source: The League of Frightened Men
L. Ron Hubbard
(1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology
Dianetics 55! (1954).