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Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.

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
Admirer
Talents
Talent
Friends
Great
Admirers

More quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

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Better not read books in which you make acquaintance of the devil.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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It's always wise to seek the truth in our opponents' error, and the error in our own truth.
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 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
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All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
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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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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The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.
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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Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith and laughter is the beginning of prayer … Laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is fulfilled by faith.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.
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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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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
Reinhold Niebuhr