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If you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong 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
Wrong
Religion
Equate
Judgment

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The history of mankind is a perennial tragedy for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.
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We have to risk a nuclear war in order to escape capitulation to Communism. For all I know, we may stumble into this terrible war.
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This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.
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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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Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.
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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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Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.
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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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Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted and pure love without power is destroyed.
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One of the fundamental points about religious humility is you say you don't know about the ultimate judgment. It's beyond your judgment. And if you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.
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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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.
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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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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There must be a realm of truth beyond political competence, that's why there must be a separation of churches, but if religion is bad and a bad religion is one that gives an ultimate sanctity to some particular cause.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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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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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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I thank heaven I have often had it in my power to give help and relief, and this is still my greatest pleasure. If I could choose my sphere of action now, it would be that of the most simple and direct efforts of this kind.
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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
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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