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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.

Reinhold Niebuhr

All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Coercion Cooperation Groups
To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Feels Religious
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 NIEBUHR

Civilization Intelligent People Quality
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
We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Country Democracy Liberty People
Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Fellow Impulse Men Needs
The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect in his essence. It can only be understood as a self-contradiction, made possible by the fact of his freedom but not following necessarily from it.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Essence Men Self
That’s much more dangerous than when people don’t believe anything; they may be confused, they may not have a sense of the meaning of life, but they’re not dangerous.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Dangerous Life Meaning More Much
[There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Group Men Vices
History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Humans Natural Realms
If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Courage Steel Survival
There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Cures Pride Religion
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
The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they’re going to do and guarantees them victory; that’s why they’re fanatic.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Communist Guarantees Victory
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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Average Christian Thinking
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”.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Bishops Christian Kind

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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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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