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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRThere 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.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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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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Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems.
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Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can only be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.
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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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Civilization depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their interests and corrupted by their prejudices.
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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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There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.
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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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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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If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.
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Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.
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I know that the Communists are atheistic and godless, but I don’t think that that’s what’s primarily the matter with them. What’s primarily the matter with them is that they worship a false god.
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In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a kind of Protestantism that said, “If you could only get rid of the Bishop, then you’d be a true Christian”.
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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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A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR