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Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.

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
Inevitable
Fruit
Judgment
Moral
Simple
Self
Judgments
Righteousness

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Rationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naïve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.
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Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
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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.
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History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
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I think that the Christian faith is right as against simple forms of secularism. That it believes that there is in man a radical freedom, and this freedom is creative but it is also destructive. And there's nothing that prevents this from being both creative and destructive.
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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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The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.
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The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
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Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
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To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.
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Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.
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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.
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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 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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All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
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