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We don't properly discriminate. We never discriminate properly when we're dealing with another group and one of the big problems about religion is that religious people don't know that they are probably as flagrant in these misjudgments as irreligious people.

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
Religious
Flagrant
Religion
Discriminate
Bigs
Properly
Another
Dealing
Problem
Group
Never
Groups
People
Problems
Probably
Irreligious

More quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

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Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.
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If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
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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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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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Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
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Rationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naïve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.
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We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.
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If you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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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For democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
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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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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Better not read books in which you make acquaintance of the devil.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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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The Jews were the money-lenders of the Middle Ages so there's a stereotype of the slightly or more than slightly dishonest business man and this stereotype covers and obscures all the facts.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don't think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indissolubility of the marriage tie.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
Reinhold Niebuhr