Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on Race Pride as ‘A Perennial Corruption of Man's Collective Life’)

“If we imagine that race pride is only a vestigial remnant of barbarism, which civilization is in the process of sloughing off; if we do not understand it as a perennial corruption of man's collective life on every level of social and moral achievement, we are bound to follow wrong policies in dealing with specific aspects of the problem. An engineer who dammed up an ocean inlet under the illusion that he was dealing with a mountain stream would be no more foolish than our social engineers who are constantly underestimating the force and the character of the social stuff that they are manipulating.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, edited by D. B. Robertson (1957)