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. – Reinhold Niebuhr
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. – Reinhold Niebuhr
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. – Reinhold Niebuhr
There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion. – Reinhold Niebuhr
The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai. – J. G. Ballard