Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRWe ought to really at least recognize the common predicament of Communists and democrats – or Americans, whatever.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
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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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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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If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
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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.
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[There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.
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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 final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
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Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
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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.
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We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR