“We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?”
More from Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to…”
“If when we judged others, our real motive was to destroy evil, we should look for evil…”
“How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in…”
“The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them.…”