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.
I'm not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.
Forgiveness is the final form of love.
The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self-mastery.
The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
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.
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.
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.
Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.
The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
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.
The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.
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.
