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The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.

Reinhold Niebuhr

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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Real Running Sacrifice
Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Men Problem Way
If you equate God’s judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Judgment Religion Wrong
I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Clubs Thinking Together
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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Capitalism Dogma Economic Freedom Guarantee
The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Conquer Historic Victory World
We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Element Justice Powerful
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Inspirational Life Motivational
To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Effort Order Social
You can’t say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Answers Giving Nuclear
Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Reason Satisfaction Selfish
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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Achievement Good Life Philosophy
This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Hypocrisy Moments Self
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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

May Realizing Tragedy
The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Law Love Significance
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Beautiful Complete Good Saved

The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.

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The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.

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