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Man has always been his own most vexing problem.

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
Men
Vexing
Problem
Always

More quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

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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
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Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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
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Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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[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
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For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
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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Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don't think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indissolubility of the marriage tie.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they're going to do and guarantees them victory that's why they're fanatic.
Reinhold Niebuhr