It’s always wise to seek the truth in our opponents’ error, and the error in our own truth.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRNothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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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.
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I think there is and ultimate answer in a true religious faith, but it doesn’t give you any immediate answers, it doesn’t.
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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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It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man’s belief in justice that makes democracy possible.
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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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If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
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Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.
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History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.
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The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment.
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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.
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You can’t say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma.
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Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
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We judge the Russians because they’re living under despotism and we don’t like it, but we’ve gotten into a fix now where we’re living in a common predicament, and we ought to recognize this common predicament.
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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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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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR