Quote

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.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Reinhold Niebuhr
Age: 78 †
Born: 1892
Born: June 21
Died: 1971
Died: June 1
Ethicist
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Theologian
University Teacher
Wright City
Missouri
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
Bring
Preacher
Truth
Club
Together
Journalist
Come
Journalism
Sentimentalism
Think
Clubs
Preachers
Thinking
Close
Matched
Ought
Journalists
Pretty
Cynicism

More quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

Image
Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
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
Image
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
There has been a religious revival because - let me put it like this, the people that weren't traditionally religious, conventionally religious, had a religion of their own in my youth. These were liberals who believed in the idea of progress or they were Marxists. Both of these secular religions have broken down.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Man is both strong and weak, both free and bound, both blind and far-seeing. He stands at the juncture of nature and spirit and is involved in both freedom and necessity.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
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, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Ultimately freedom is necessary for a society, because every despotic society - for instance, the Russian society - lives on the basis of a rather implausible dogma - the Marxist dogma of world redemption through Communism.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
[There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
Reinhold Niebuhr