History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRThat’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.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
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The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.
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Aim for the stars and maybe you’ll reach the sky.
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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
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We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.
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That is the truth about man – that he has a curious kind of dignity, but also a curious kind of misery, and that these forms of agnosticism don’t understand.
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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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Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
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A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.
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For democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.
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Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
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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 significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.
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The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect in his essence. It can only be understood as a self-contradiction, made possible by the fact of his freedom but not following necessarily from it.
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The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR