There are evidently limits to the achievements of science; and there are irresolvable contradictions both between prosperity and virtue, and between happiness and ”the good life,” which had not been anticipated in our philosophy.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRA dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the “ideology” of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.
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Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.
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You can’t say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma.
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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
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We ought to really at least recognize the common predicament of Communists and democrats – or Americans, whatever.
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[There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.
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Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
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Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can only be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.
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If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
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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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All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.
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I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.
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Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends.
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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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A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR