For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRJustice 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.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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The fanatic is dangerous.
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That’s why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn’t believe this.
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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.
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Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.
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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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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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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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Politics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history, that I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism.
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Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.
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What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously.
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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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The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.
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If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.
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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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Therefore we have a long history of freedom, where people try to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual – this freedom is necessary for the individual.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR