Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRThe measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems.
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It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.
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Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
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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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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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For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
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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.
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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
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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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A republic properly understood is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will.
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Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
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All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
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The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
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Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.
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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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR







