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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.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Cheese Good Wine
The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Audience Eye Style
Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.
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Goodness Love Power
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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Inhumanity Limit Man Measure
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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Justice Life Rights
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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Race Sports Understanding
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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Average Christian Thinking
All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point; it’s a rather vapid form of religion.
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Materialism Thinking Vapid
…(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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Self Spirituality Transcendence
It’s always wise to seek the truth in our opponents’ error, and the error in our own truth.
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Errors Opponents Wise
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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Age Dishonest Facts Men
If you equate God’s judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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Judgment Religion Wrong
To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.
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Effort Order Social
If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.
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God Moral Revealed
Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It’s necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Ambition Art Society Two
Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Atheist Christian Men

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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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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