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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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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
Satisfaction
Legitimate
Others
Grant
Reason
Grants
Tends
Check
Checks
Impulse
Selfish
Impulses

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Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone therefore we are saved by love.
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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.
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We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.
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The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
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All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.
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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.
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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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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.
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If you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
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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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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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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
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The dimension of depth in the consciousness of religion creates the tension between what is and what ought to be. It bends the bow from which every arrow of moral action flies.
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Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history therefore we must be saved by faith.
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Man has always been his own most vexing problem.
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A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.
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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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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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