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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

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
…(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self’s capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Self Spirituality Transcendence
History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

History Law May
The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Historical Persistance Reckoning
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
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
That is one of the flagrant misconceptions about Catholicism in America that if a man is a Catholic he owes allegiance to what they say a foreign sovereign, or something like that.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Catholic Country Men Misconception
We ought to really at least recognize the common predicament of Communists and democrats – or Americans, whatever.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Common Communist Predicaments
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 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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Character Mean Real
Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Age Bound Leaps Reaction
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Accomplished Accomplishment Love
It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Charity Difficult Significant
If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

God Moral Revealed
Politics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history, that I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Common Kind Sense Thinking
We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Believe Exercise Passion

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.

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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.

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