Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRThe old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
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History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
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Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.
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Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.
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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.
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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.
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We ought to really at least recognize the common predicament of Communists and democrats – or Americans, whatever.
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I think I have one answer, that is partly religious and partly secular; and that is to say, we ought to at least recognize that we and the Russians are in a common predicament. That would be religious in the sense, “Judge not lest you be judged.”
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If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
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My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: “By their fruits shall ye know them.”
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A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.
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Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.
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All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.
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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.
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Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR