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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRI 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.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.
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Aim for the stars and maybe you’ll reach the sky.
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[There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.
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History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.
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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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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.
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God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
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The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.
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The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.
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Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
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To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.
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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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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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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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All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point; it’s a rather vapid form of religion.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR