If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory and denies in p… - Reinhold Niebuhr

Social justice is an application of the law of love to the sociopolitical sphere, and love is the motivating energy of the struggle for justice. The meaning of justice cannot be taken directly from the principles. It is determined only in the interaction of love and situation, through the mediation of the principles of equality, freedom, and order.10

It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.

The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.