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The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

Reinhold Niebuhr

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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Children Community Real
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
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Accomplishment Lifetime Success
If you equate God’s judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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Judgment Religion Wrong
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.
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Communist Guarantees Victory
If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
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Courage Steel Survival
The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.
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Historical Persistance Reckoning
The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.
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Audience Eye Style
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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Answers Believe Problem
Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.
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Cheese Good Wine
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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Clubs Thinking Together
We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
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Believe Exercise Passion
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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Fellow Impulse Men Needs
Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.
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Goodness Love Power
The separation of church and state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn’t interfere with the religious vision or with the religious prophet.
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Country Giving People Religious
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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Justice Life Rights
Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice.
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Drama Dream Moving
I know that the Communists are atheistic and godless, but I don’t think that that’s what’s primarily the matter with them. What’s primarily the matter with them is that they worship a false god.
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Belief Confused Thinking
Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.
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Confusion Political Relative Value
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.
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Achievement Good Life Philosophy
The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.
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Church Congregational Mean Race
Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.
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Done Evil Good People
Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.
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Form Modern
It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man’s belief in justice that makes democracy possible.
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Evil Justice Men
Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
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Accomplished Life Lifetime Single
Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
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Reason Satisfaction Selfish
The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.
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Judgment Prophet
There must be equality of all men before God and in a democratic society. Now that’s one of the great achievements.
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Achievement Democratic Men

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

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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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