This deeper framework for lif...

This deeper framework for life came to me rather suddenly, as to many in those years, through the speaking and writing of Reinhold Niebuhr. Here was a searching realism that was willing to face all the ambiguity and squalor of any human social situation. At the same time, it was intensely moral, for it had a deep commitment to human good. - P72

"It may have been, as I recall Reinhold Niebuhr once saying somewhere, the goodness and rationality of men which made the rise of democracy in human affairs possible. - P128

I was continually reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr’s remark that religion is not the place where the problem of man’s egotism is automatically solved. Rather, it is there that the ultimate battle between human pride and God’s grace takes place. - P192

Injustice to other men, as Reinhold Niebuhr has said, is the social consequence of an inward idolatry, the worship of one’s own self or group. - P232

Together we are very powerful...

Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that yes, we can change the world because we have many times before. You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.

Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.

She stood before us, without ...

She stood before us, without notes, books or nerves. The lectern was occupied by her handbag. She looked around, smiled, was still, and began. - P3

I can’t remember what she taught us in that first lesson. But I knew obscurely that, for once in my life, I had arrived at the right place. - P3

[오늘의 한문장] 산둥 수용소

"아무리 성자 같은 사람도 식사다운 식사를 못하면 죄인처럼 행동할 것이다."
베르톨트 브레히트, 서푼짜리 오페라 (열린책들 역간) - P11

man’s ingenuity in dealing wi...

man’s ingenuity in dealing with difficult problems was unlimited, making irrelevant those so-called "deeper issues" of his spiritual life with which religion and philosophy pretended to deal. - P75

The trouble with my new humanism, I found myself deciding, was not its confidence in human science and technology. It was rather its naive and unrealistic faith in the rationality and goodness of the men who wielded these instruments. - P75

I began to see that without moral health, a community is as helpless and lost as it is without material supplies and services. - P76

A marginal existence neither improves men nor makes them wicked; it places a premium on every action, and in doing so reveals the actual inward character that every man has always possessed. - P92

When, however, the point at issue was not an hour’s work but a basic condition of life—such as the space a man lived in or the amount of food he had to eat—then this good will tended to recede and in most cases to disappear. - P92

Rational behavior in communal action is primarily a moral and not an intellectual achievement, possible only to a person who is morally capable of self-sacrifice. In a real sense, I came to believe, moral selflessness is a prerequisite for the life of reason—not its consequence, as so many philosophers contend. - P93

Next to space, food was the necessity in very short supply. - P96

Wealth is a dynamic force that can too easily become demonic—for if it does not do great good, it can do great harm. - P105

Weihsien camp’s greatest difficulties with law and order had to do not so much with the justice as with the strength of its laws. The main problem was the political one of generating governmental power, rather than of ruling with wisdom and justice—though that was by no means easy. - P141

A moral disease such as stealing could have the same disintegrating effect on our utilities that a case of bubonic plague has on the human anatomy. - P147

A community needs ethical people, but does the secular world need religious people? Are the saints really good, is religious piety a requisite for communal virtue, do we need God in order to love our fellow man? These questions occurred to me with increasing frequency as the deep significance of the moral dimension of life came clear to me. I looked around to find enlightenment. - P163

The most important lesson I learned is that there are no cut-and-dried categories in human life, no easily recognizable brand names by which we can estimate our fellows. Over and over "respectable people," one of the commonest labels applied in social intercourse, turned out to be uncooperative, irritable, and worse, dishonest. - P163

Considering the difficulty of cataloging people in neat pigeon-holes, it was not strange that there were also innumerable surprises in the behavior of the religious ones among us. - P168

Besides personal integrity, the deepest spiritual problem an internment camp encounters is that of "meaning." This word can signify many diverse things. There is the semantic and logical problem of the meaning of words, symbols, and propositions, with which recent philosophy has so much concerned itself. There is also the existential problem of the meaning of life. - P193

For even saintly folk will act like sinners Unless they have their customary dinners. —BERTOLT BRECHT, The Threepenny Opera