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Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

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
Virtue
Impulses
Moral
Sole
Social
Rooted
Reason
Impulse
Men
Basis
Life
Rational
Bases
Deeply

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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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The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
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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.
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If you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.
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There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or the capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervious to change.
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All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.
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We misjudge anybody who's different from us and the Jews diverge from our type, ethnically and religiously. That's their chief offense, but there are particular causes.
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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
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Man has always been his own most vexing problem.
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Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone therefore we are saved by love.
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Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends.
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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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You can't say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma.
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I think that the achievements of Catholicism on race are very, very impressive.
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Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
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The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
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Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.
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