The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRAim for the stars and maybe you’ll reach the sky.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.
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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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We judge the Russians because they’re living under despotism and we don’t like it, but we’ve gotten into a fix now where we’re living in a common predicament, and we ought to recognize this common predicament.
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I’ve long ago felt, I have many Jewish friends and I very I think creative Jewish friends, and I’ve long felt that the average Christian didn’t realize the tremendous capacity for civic righteousness among our Jewish people.
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The separation of church and state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn’t interfere with the religious vision or with the religious prophet.
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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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Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the “children of light.” Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest.
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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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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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Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
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The Jews were the money-lenders of the Middle Ages so there’s a stereotype of the slightly or more than slightly dishonest business man and this stereotype covers and obscures all the facts.
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There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.
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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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Certainly, anybody who says, “in the eyes of God,” is pretentious.
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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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The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one.
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A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architec75tural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.
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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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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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It’s always wise to seek the truth in our opponents’ error, and the error in our own truth.
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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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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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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
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Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.
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The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment.
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A 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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR