The worst human conflicts are conflicts between righteous men who are too self-righteous to know how evil they are. They are conflicts between nations and cultures who do not recognize how partial and relative is every value of human devotion. It is the human effort to make our partial values absolute which is always the final sin in human life; and it always results in the most bloody of human conflicts.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) American theologian and clergyman

Doom and Dawn [with George S. Eddy] (1936)