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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.

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
World
Ultimately
Despotic
Bases
Marxist
Necessary
Dogma
Society
Redemption
Rather
Russian
Freedom
Communism
Lives
Basis
Every
Instance
Implausible

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Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.
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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.
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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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The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.
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If you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.
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I think that the achievements of Catholicism on race are very, very impressive.
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Politics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history, that I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism.
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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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All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
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There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.
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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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Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.
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The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.
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 whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
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The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
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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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