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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRThere is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control.
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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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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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Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
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The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
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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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[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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There must be equality of all men before God and in a democratic society. Now that’s one of the great achievements.
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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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No nation can say, ‘We will capitulate to tyranny rather than accept a speculative fate – to accept an absolute fate in alternative to a speculative one’ – no nation can do that.
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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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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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To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.
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It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.
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Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.
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If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
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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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All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.
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I’m not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.
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The fanatic is dangerous.
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Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems.
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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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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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Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
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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.
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