1952

1952—Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
--We might be tempted to bring the whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations. The political term for such an effort is “preventative war.” It is not an immediate temptation; but it could become so in the next decade or two. A democracy can not, of course, engage in an explicit preventative war...
--The lip service which the whole culture pays to the principles of laissez-faire makes for tardiness in dealing with the instability of a free economy ... Some believe that .. a recurrence of such a catastrophe [the Great Depression] is impossible; but it is not altogether certain that this is true...
--This tendency is accentuated in our own day by the humorless idealism of our culture with its simply moral distinctions between good and bad nations, the good nations being those which are devoted to “liberty.”
--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 that leads to death has already begun.