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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.

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
Think
Materialism
Thinking
Beside
Talk
American
Point
Rather
Vapid
Religion
Fearing
Form
Atheistic

More quotes by 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.
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Man has always been his own most vexing problem.
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Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
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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.
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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.
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That is the truth about man - that he has a curious kind of dignity, but also a curious kind of misery, and that these forms of agnosticism don't understand.
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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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For democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.
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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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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 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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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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Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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If you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Better not read books in which you make acquaintance of the devil.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
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.
Reinhold Niebuhr