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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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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
Groups
Delegated
Modern
Increasing
Imagine
Tendency
Men
Ethical
Tendencies
Larger
Vices
Among

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Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted and pure love without power is destroyed.
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The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect in his essence. It can only be understood as a self-contradiction, made possible by the fact of his freedom but not following necessarily from it.
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Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone therefore we are saved by love.
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I think that when we believe that something is right, there's a serious ambivalence about it. On one hand, you say, because it's right, it must be victorious. On the other hand, you say, it's right whether it's victorious or not. And this is what I believe about a free society.
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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.
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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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Man is both strong and weak, both free and bound, both blind and far-seeing. He stands at the juncture of nature and spirit and is involved in both freedom and necessity.
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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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The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
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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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We judge the Russians because they're living under despotism and we don't like it, but we've gotten into a fix now where we're living in a common predicament, and we ought to recognize this common predicament.
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Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.
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For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
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Better not read books in which you make acquaintance of the devil.
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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.
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Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
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Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.
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All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point it's a rather vapid form of religion.
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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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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
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