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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRI think there is and ultimate answer in a true religious faith, but it doesn’t give you any immediate answers, it doesn’t.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
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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.
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This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.
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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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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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History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
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Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It’s necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society.
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Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.
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Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems.
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All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.
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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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If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.
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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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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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Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
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All known existence points beyond itself.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR