Love is not merely the content of an impossible ethical ideal. It is the motive force of the struggle for justice. - Reinhold Niebuhr

[The value and dignity of the individual] is threatened whenever it is assumed that individual desires, hopes and ideals can be fitted with frictionless harmony into the collective purposes of man. The individual is not discrete. He cannot find his fulfillment outside of the community; but he also cannot find fulfillment completely within society. In so far as he finds fulfillment within society he must abate his individual ambitions. He must 'die to self' if he would truly live. In so far as he finds fulfillment beyond every historical community he lives his life in painful tension with even the best community, sometimes achieving standards of conduct which defy the standards of the community with a resolute "we must obey God rather than man."

To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.