A Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of the whole Oxford group enterprise from the very beginning. (Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman… - Reinhold Niebuhr

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A Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of the whole Oxford group enterprise from the very beginning. (Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman")

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About Reinhold Niebuhr

Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (21 June 1892 – 1 June 1971) was an American Protestant theologian most famous for his efforts to relate the Christian faith to the realities of politics and diplomacy. He is a crucial contributor to modern thinking about what a just war would be.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Native Name: Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

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Additional quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

Man is the kind of animal who cannot merely live. If he lives at all, he is bound to seek the realization of his true nature; and to his true nature belongs his fulfilment in the lives of others. The will to live is thus transmuted into the will to self-realization; and self-realization involves self-giving in relation to others. When this desire for self-realization is fully explored, it becomes apparent that it is subject to the paradox that the highest form of self-realization is the consequence of self-giving, but that it cannot be the intended consequence without being prematurely limited. Thus the will to live is finally transmuted into its opposite in the sense that only in self-giving can the self be fulfilled, for: “he that findeth his life shall lose it and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Reinhold Niebuhr The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness 1945 p. 20-21

The hope that the internal enemies will all be destroyed and that the new society will create only men who will be in perfect accord with the collective will of society, and will not seek personal advantage in the social process, is romantic in its interpretation of the possibilities of human nature and in its mystical glorification of the anticipated automatic mutuality in the communist society. ...In all these prophecies pure sentimentality obscures the fact that there can never be a perfect mutuality of interest between individuals who perform different functions in society... Man will always be imaginative enough to enlarge his needs beyond minimum requirements and selfish enough to feel the pressure of his needs more than the needs of others. Every society will have to maintain methods of arbitrating conflicting needs to the end of history; and in that process those who are shrewder will gain some advantage over the simple, even if they should lack special instruments of power.

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Even as rigorous a determinist as Karl Marx, who at times described the social behaviour of the bourgeoisie in terms which suggested a problem in social physics, could subject it at other times to a withering scorn which only the presupposition of moral responsibility could justify.

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