For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
As racial, economic and national groups, they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.
All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.
Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems.
Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.
I’m not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.
I think I should know how to educate a boy, but not a girl; I should be in danger of making her too learned.
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.
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.
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.
Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.
Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.
Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.
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.
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.
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.
It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man’s belief in justice that makes democracy possible.
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.