Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.
You can't say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma.
The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.
As racial, economic and national groups, they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.
Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.
Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible...just bad enough to make it neccessary.
Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.
A republic properly understood is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will.
All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
I think I should know how to educate a boy, but not a girl; I should be in danger of making her too learned.
Where, but in the simplicity of the Gospel, can you hear about both the dignity of man and the misery of man?
The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.
It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man's belief in justice that makes democracy possible.
The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.
It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.
We ought to really at least recognize the common predicament of Communists and democrats - or Americans, whatever.
There must be equality of all men before God and in a democratic society. Now that's one of the great achievements.
To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.
The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.
The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one.
Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.
The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
I think there is and ultimate answer in a true religious faith, but it doesn't give you any immediate answers, it doesn't.
Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends.
Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.
The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks.
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.
Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.
Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.
The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.
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.
The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.
All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point; it's a rather vapid form of religion.
Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.
Politics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history, that I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism.
All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
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.
The nuclear age has refuted the idea of progress and Marxism has been refuted by Stalinism. Therefore people have returned to the historic religion.
[There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.
I don't know whether any religious leader would say that we must ultimately win, because we're on God's side. If they do say that, it's bad religion.
Religion mustn't interfere with the state - so one of the basic Democratic principles as we know it in America is the separation of church and state.
Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer … Laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is fulfilled by faith.
In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a kind of Protestantism that said, "If you could only get rid of the Bishop, then you'd be a true Christian".
I cannot worship the abstractions of virtue: she only charms me when she addresses herself to my heart, speaks through the love from which she springs.
The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.
...(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.