Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their own deceptions. Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are most convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise.

The intelligent man, who exploits available resources for knowledge of the needs and wants of his fellows, will be more inclined to adjust his conduct to their needs than those who are less intelligent.

Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their own deceptions. Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it.

The highest type of leadership maintains itself by its intrinsic worth, sans panoply, pomp and power. Of course, there are never enough real leaders to go around. Wherefore it becomes necessary to dress some men up and by other artificial means to give them a prestige and a power which they could not win by their own resources.

The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the “happiness of mankind” as its promise.

The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.

My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: “By their fruits shall ye know them.” I wouldn’t judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits – the relevant fruits – are, I’d say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits.

Power,” he wrote, “always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.

The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove.

Men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken.

I regret the immaturity with which I approached the problems and tasks of the ministry but I do not regret the years devoted to the parish.

Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt.

Every profession has its traditions and its traditionalists. But the traditionalists in the pulpit are much more certain than the others that the Lord is on their side.

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

I’m not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.

I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really appreciate the meaning of the cross.

History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.

If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our present civilization.

We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.

A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don’t think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indissolubility of the marriage tie.

We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.

The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.

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.

For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.

The morality of the church is anachronistic. Will it ever develop a moral insight and courage sufficient to cope with the real problems of modern society? If it does it will require generations of effort and not a few martyrdoms. We ministers maintain our pride and self-respect and our sense of importance only through a vast and inclusive ignorance. If we knew the world in which we live a little better we would perish in shame or be overcome by a sense of futility.

Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.

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

To be religious is not to feel, but to be.

I think I should know how to educate a boy, but not a girl; I should be in danger of making her too learned.

There is no deeper pathos in the spiritual life of man than the cruelty of righteous people. If any one idea dominates the teachings of Jesus, it is his opposition to the self-righteousness of the righteous.

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.

It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.

Even as rigorous a determinist as Karl Marx, who at times described the social behaviour of the bourgeoisie in terms which suggested a problem in social physics, could subject it at other times to a withering scorn which only the presupposition of moral responsibility could justify.

Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.

All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.

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.

If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.

A republic properly understood is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will.

There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.

The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.

Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.

Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.

It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man’s belief in justice that makes democracy possible.

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.

We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate.

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.

Despotism, which we regard with abhorrence, is rather too plausible in decaying feudal, agrarian, pastoral societies. That’s why we must expect to have many a defeat before we’ll have an ultimate victory in this contest with Communism.

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.

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

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.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.

Civilization depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their interests and corrupted by their prejudices.

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.

The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.

Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.

Men have never been individually self-sufficient.

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.

Better not read books in which you make acquaintance of the devil.

To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.

The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.

The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect in his essence. It can only be understood as a self-contradiction, made possible by the fact of his freedom but not following necessarily from it.

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

The dimension of depth in the consciousness of religion creates the tension between what is and what ought to be. It bends the bow from which every arrow of moral action flies.

History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.

Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.

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.

The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.

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

All known existence points beyond itself.

Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.

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.

The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.

Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

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.

If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.

The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one.

Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.”

Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.

The fence and the boundary line are the symbols of the spirit of justice. They set the limits upon each man’s interest to prevent one from taking advantage of the other.

Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.

All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

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

Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.

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.

All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.

Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility.

The chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.

Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems.

Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth.

Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.

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.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

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.

Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.

Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Humor is a prelude to faith and laughter is the beginning of prayer.

Man is his own most vexing problem.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.

Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.

Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.

Aim for the stars and maybe you’ll reach the sky.

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.