Community Quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

9 Community quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

All Community quotes Reinhold Niebuhr’s page

Reinhold Niebuhr’s reflective take on Community is distilled into nine concise lines, giving a clear glimpse of his Christian‑realist view on social responsibility. This short list makes his profound insights easily digestible.

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The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don't think it has a right to prohibit…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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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;…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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Adam Smith's was a real universalism in intent. Laissez Faire was intended to establish a world community as well as a natural…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can only be sustained by a spirit of…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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I know that the Communists are atheistic and godless, but I don't think that that's what's primarily the matter with them. What's…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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You might get rid of the Bishop and get to the local Ku Klux Klan leader. That, on the whole, has been…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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There are evidently limits to the achievements of science; and there are irresolvable contradictions both between prosperity and virtue, and between happiness and ''the…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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Perhapsthemost sublimeinsights oftheJewishprophets and the Christian gospel is the knowledge that since perfection is love, the apprehension of perfection is at once the means…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect in his…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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Liberalism makes this mistake in regard to private property and Marxism makes it in regard to socialized property... The Marxist illusion is partly derived…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.

Reinhold Niebuhr

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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…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.

Reinhold Niebuhr

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All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.

Reinhold Niebuhr

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Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream.

Reinhold Niebuhr

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When a church reaches up beyond its group and tries to enforce its standards upon a society that doesn't accept these standards, and perhaps…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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...(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.

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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Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the…

Reinhold Niebuhr

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