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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRThe 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.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.
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The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.
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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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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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Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
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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 think there is and ultimate answer in a true religious faith, but it doesn’t give you any immediate answers, it doesn’t.
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All known existence points beyond itself.
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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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Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.
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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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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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Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
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We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
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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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR