What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRIt’s always wise to seek the truth in our opponents’ error, and the error in our own truth.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
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Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
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Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
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Justice requires that we carefully weigh rights and privileges and assure that each member of a community receives his due share. Love does not weigh rights and privileges too carefully because it prompts each to bear the burden of the other.
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Certainly, anybody who says, “in the eyes of God,” is pretentious.
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The nuclear age has refuted the idea of progress and Marxism has been refuted by Stalinism. Therefore people have returned to the historic religion.
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Aim for the stars and maybe you’ll reach the sky.
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The chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.
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Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice.
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The fanatic is dangerous.
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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.
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The development of a managerial class in Russia, combing economic with political power, is an historic refutation of the Marxist theory.
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The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control.
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It’s always wise to seek the truth in our opponents’ error, and the error in our own truth.
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We misjudge anybody who’s different from us and the Jews diverge from our type, ethnically and religiously. That’s their chief offense, but there are particular causes.
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If you equate God’s judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
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If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
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I’m not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.
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All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point; it’s a rather vapid form of religion.
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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
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There was a time when I had all the answers. My real growth began when I discovered that the questions to which I had the answers were not the important questions.
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For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
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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.
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A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.
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In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a kind of Protestantism that said, “If you could only get rid of the Bishop, then you’d be a true Christian”.
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