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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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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
Given
Prejudice
Mean
Absolutes
Absolute
Obviously
Democratic
Control
Race
Congregational
Church
Churches

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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.
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Certainly, anybody who says, in the eyes of God, is pretentious.
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Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.
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The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.
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Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.
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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.
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If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
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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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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.
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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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Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone therefore we are saved by love.
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Man has always been his own most vexing problem.
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Better not read books in which you make acquaintance of the devil.
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The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
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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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If you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.
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Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.
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The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one.
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The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
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