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“ ”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.
About Reinhold Niebuhr
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (21 June 1892 – 1 June 1971) was an American Protestant theologian most famous for his efforts to relate the Christian faith to the realities of politics and diplomacy. He is a crucial contributor to modern thinking about what a just war would be.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Shorter versions of this quote
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.
Additional quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr
Philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.
The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove.
1924 A revival meeting seems never to get under my skin. Perhaps I am too fish-blooded to enjoy them. But I object not so much to the emotionalism as to the lack of intellectual honesty of the average revival preacher. I do not mean to imply that the evangelists are necessarily consciously dishonest. They just don’t know enough about life and history to present the problem of the Christian life in its full meaning. They are always assuming that nothing but an emotional commitment to Christ is needed to save the soul from its sin and chaos. They seem never to realize how many of the miseries of mankind are due not to malice but to misdirected zeal and unbalanced virtue. They never help the people who corrupt family love by making the family a selfish unit in society or those who brutalize industry by excessive devotion to the prudential virtues.