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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.

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
Men
Forms
Misery
Dignity
Understand
Form
Truth
Also
Agnosticism
Kind
Curious

More quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

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The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Man has always been his own most vexing problem.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.
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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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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I'm not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
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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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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The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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I think I have one answer, that is partly religious and partly secular and that is to say, we ought to at least recognize that we and the Russians are in a common predicament. That would be religious in the sense, Judge not lest you be judged.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or the capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervious to change.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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For democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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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Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.
Reinhold Niebuhr