The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRThe 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.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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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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Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.
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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.
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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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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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The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses.
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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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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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We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate.
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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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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
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Certainly, anybody who says, “in the eyes of God,” is pretentious.
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Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.
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If you equate God’s judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR