"This brings me to the very center of my convictions, which, I hope, I share with many others. I have always been reluctant to talk about it because I am not one to air my religious views in public, but let me say it here quite plainly: the ultimate source of our civilization's disease is the spiritual and religious crisis which has overtaken all of us and which each must master for himself. Above all, man is Homo religiosus, and yet we have, for the past century, made the desperate attempt to get along without God, and in the place of God we have set up the cult of man, his profane or even ungodly science and art, his technical achievements, and his State. We may be certain that some day the whole world will come to see, in a blinding flash, what is now clear to only a few, namely, that this desperate attempt has created a situation in which man can have no spiritual and moral life, and this means that he cannot live at all for any length of time, in spite of television and speedways and holiday trips and comfortable apartments. We seem to have proved the existence of God in yet another way: by the practical consequences of His assumed non-existence."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wilhelm_R%C3%B6pke
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Wilhelm Röpke
24 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Wilhelm Röpke →
Related Quotes
"Since men obviously cannot live in a religious vacuum, they cling to surrogate religions of all kinds, to political p…"
"However, and here we return again to our main theme, we would merely be deluding ourselves if we drew such a sharp di…"
"All these peculiarities of the structure of modern tyranny, whose ugliest and extremest form was Nazism, are marked b…"
"The questionable things of this world come to grief on their nature, the good ones on their own excesses."
"We need a combination of supreme moral sensitivity and economic knowledge. Economically ignorant moralism is as objec…"
"The place of any good in this scale of values is determined ultimately by the strength of the subjective demand for it."
"The processes peculiar to economic life in a free society make evident the fundamental superiority of the spontaneous…"
"Whether in Bolshevism, Fascism, or Nazism, we meet continually with the forcible and ruthless usurpation of the power…"
"The more we gained knowledge of these new totalitarian systems of mass-rule, the more we realized not only their simi…"
"The market economy is not everything. It must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply…"