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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.

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
Highest
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Insinuation
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Ideal
Envisaged
Makes
Inevitable
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Hypocrisy
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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Certainly, anybody who says, in the eyes of God, is pretentious.
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I think that the achievements of Catholicism on race are very, very impressive.
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The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.
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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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That is the truth about man - that he has a curious kind of dignity, but also a curious kind of misery, and that these forms of agnosticism don't understand.
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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.
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Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.
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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.
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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.
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Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
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That is one of the flagrant misconceptions about Catholicism in America that if a man is a Catholic he owes allegiance to what they say a foreign sovereign, or something like that.
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Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
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I think I have one answer, that is partly religious and partly secular and that is to say, we ought to at least recognize that we and the Russians are in a common predicament. That would be religious in the sense, Judge not lest you be judged.
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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.
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