The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRFor man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.
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Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.
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It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man’s belief in justice that makes democracy possible.
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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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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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…(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self’s capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.
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At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind.
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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
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The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.
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All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.
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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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It’s always wise to seek the truth in our opponents’ error, and the error in our own truth.
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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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The history of mankind is a perennial tragedy; for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.
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Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.
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Certainly, anybody who says, “in the eyes of God,” is pretentious.
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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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Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
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In the Old Testament, the God of the Prophets never was completely on Israel’s side. There was a primitive national religion, but it was always a transcendent God who had judgment first in the House of God.
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We Protestants ought to humbly confess that the theater and the sports have done more for race amity, for race understanding than, on the whole, the Protestant Church in certain type, in certain parts of the nation.
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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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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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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
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The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they’re going to do and guarantees them victory; that’s why they’re fanatic.
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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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Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR