19 quotes
Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
The naïve faith of the proletarian is the faith of the man of action. Rationality belongs to the cool observers.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life. Reason may extend and stabilise, but it does not create, the capacity to affirm other life than his own.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
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.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
The inertia of society is so stubborn that no one will move against it, if he cannot believe that it can be more easily overcome than is actually the case.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
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.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
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.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
The truest visions of religion are illusions, which may be partially realised by being resolutely believed. For what religion believes to be true is not wholly true but ought to be true; and may become true if its truth is not doubted.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
The extension of human sympathies [toward ever-larger communities] has... resulted in the creation of larger units of conflict without abolishing conflict. So civilization has become a device for delegating the vices of individuals to larger and larger communities.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.
Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)