Adam Smith’s was a real universalism in intent. Laissez Faire was intended to establish a world community as well as a natural harmony of interests within each nation… But the “children of darkness” were able to make good use of his creed.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRWe 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.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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No nation can say, ‘We will capitulate to tyranny rather than accept a speculative fate – to accept an absolute fate in alternative to a speculative one’ – no nation can do that.
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We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
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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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Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
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Certainly, anybody who says, “in the eyes of God,” is pretentious.
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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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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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The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.
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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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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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The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.
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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.
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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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I’m not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.
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We have to risk a nuclear war in order to escape capitulation to Communism. For all I know, we may stumble into this terrible war.
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If you equate God’s judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
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That is the truth about man – that he has a curious kind of dignity, but also a curious kind of misery, and that these forms of agnosticism don’t understand.
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All known existence points beyond itself.
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That’s why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn’t believe this.
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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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The development of a managerial class in Russia, combing economic with political power, is an historic refutation of the Marxist theory.
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Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.
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It’s always wise to seek the truth in our opponents’ error, and the error in our own truth.
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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
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The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR