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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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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
Going
Fanatic
Communists
Fanatics
Guarantees
Communist
Victory
History
Dialectic
Everything
Dialectics

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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Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.
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The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
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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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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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Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.
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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.
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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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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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God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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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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 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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I think that the Christian faith is right as against simple forms of secularism. That it believes that there is in man a radical freedom, and this freedom is creative but it is also destructive. And there's nothing that prevents this from being both creative and destructive.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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What is so funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously. Laughter is the same and healthy response to the innocent foibles of men and even to some which are not innocent.
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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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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Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
Reinhold Niebuhr