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Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.

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
Religion
Social
Declares
True
Uneasiness
Truth
Profound
Nothing
Highest
Men
Consciousness
Modern
Values

More quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

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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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We judge the Russians because they're living under despotism and we don't like it, but we've gotten into a fix now where we're living in a common predicament, and we ought to recognize this common predicament.
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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.
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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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Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.
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I don't know whether any religious leader would say that we must ultimately win, because we're on God's side. If they do say that, it's bad religion.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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I thank heaven I have often had it in my power to give help and relief, and this is still my greatest pleasure. If I could choose my sphere of action now, it would be that of the most simple and direct efforts of this kind.
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We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Not only in America but in Germany, in France since the war, in Germany after the First World War, the Germany of Adenauer, these are the creative relationships of Catholicism to a free society that the average American doesn't fully appreciate.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Politics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history, that I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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The history of mankind is a perennial tragedy for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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 Niebuhr
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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, 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
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The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
Reinhold Niebuhr