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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

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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
Indeed
Vindictive
Democracy
Democracies
Rather
Tolerable
Upon
Martial
Peace
Reluctant
War
Venture
Make
Equally
Slow
Embarked

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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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The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one.
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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.
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For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
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We have to risk a nuclear war in order to escape capitulation to Communism. For all I know, we may stumble into this terrible war.
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Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.
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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.
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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.
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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
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Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
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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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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. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.
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Man has always been his own most vexing problem.
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We misjudge anybody who's different from us and the Jews diverge from our type, ethnically and religiously. That's their chief offense, but there are particular causes.
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You can't say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma.
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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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For democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.
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The Jews were the money-lenders of the Middle Ages so there's a stereotype of the slightly or more than slightly dishonest business man and this stereotype covers and obscures all the facts.
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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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Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.
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