Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes

Man is both strong and weak, both free and bound, both blind and far-seeing. He stands at the juncture of nature and spirit; and is involved in both freedom and necessity.

Whenever a church does anything for its own group, it has that right.

Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.

The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one.

The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.

The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence, which threaten the very meaning of our life.

For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.

Even as rigorous a determinist as Karl Marx, who at times described the social behaviour of the bourgeoisie in terms which suggested a problem in social physics, could subject it at other times to a withering scorn which only the presupposition of moral responsibility could justify.

If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.

I cannot worship the abstractions of virtue: she only charms me when she addresses herself to my heart, speaks through the love from which she springs.

I know that the Communists are atheistic and godless, but I don't think that that's what's primarily the matter with them. What's primarily the matter with them is that they worship a false god. That's much more dangerous than when people don't believe anything; they may be confused, they may not have a sense of the meaning of life, but they're not dangerous.

The history of mankind is a perennial tragedy; for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.

I'm not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.

Liberalism makes this mistake in regard to private property and Marxism makes it in regard to socialized property... The Marxist illusion is partly derived from a romantic conception of human nature... It assumes that the socialization of property will eliminate human egotism... The development of a managerial class in Russia, combing economic with political power, is an historic refutation of the Marxist theory.

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen.

I think that when we believe that something is right, there's a serious ambivalence about it. On one hand, you say, because it's right, it must be victorious. On the other hand, you say, it's right whether it's victorious or not. And this is what I believe about a free society.

Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream.

Now the ordinary Protestant, Jew or Secularist has a stereotype about Catholicism. It consists of Spanish Catholicism, Latin-American Catholicism and, let us say, a Catholicism of O'Connor's "Great Hurrah." Now there are types of Catholicism like that but this doesn't - this doesn't do justice to the genuine relation that Catholicism has had to Democratic Society.

Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.

There must be equality of all men before God and in a democratic society. Now that's one of the great achievements.

Not only in America but in Germany, in France since the war, in Germany after the First World War, the Germany of Adenauer, these are the creative relationships of Catholicism to a free society that the average American doesn't fully appreciate.

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. Grant me the patience with changes that take time, appreciation of all that I have, tolerance of those with different struggles, and the strength to get up and try again, one day at a time.

The separation of church and state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn't interfere with the religious vision or with the religious prophet. There must be a realm of truth beyond political competence, that's why there must be a separation of churches, but if religion is bad and a bad religion is one that gives an ultimate sanctity to some particular cause. Then religion mustn't interfere with the state - so one of the basic Democratic principles as we know it in America is the separation of church and state.

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

The nuclear age has refuted the idea of progress and Marxism has been refuted by Stalinism. Therefore people have returned to the historic religion.

No nation can say, 'We will capitulate to tyranny rather than accept a speculative fate - to accept an absolute fate in alternative to a speculative one' - no nation can do that.

We judge the Russians because they're living under despotism and we don't like it, but we've gotten into a fix now where we're living in a common predicament, and we ought to recognize this common predicament.

We ought to really at least recognize the common predicament of Communists and democrats - or Americans, whatever.

All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.

History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.

Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.

The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.

Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.

I think I have one answer, that is partly religious and partly secular; and that is to say, we ought to at least recognize that we and the Russians are in a common predicament. That would be religious in the sense, "Judge not lest you be judged."

All known existence points beyond itself.

History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.

That is the truth about man - that he has a curious kind of dignity, but also a curious kind of misery, and that these forms of agnosticism don't understand.

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.

A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don't think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indissolubility of the marriage tie.

The idea that the profits of capital are really the rewards of a just society for the foresight and thrift of those who sacrificed the immediate pleasures of spending in order that society might have productive capital, had a certain validity in the early days of capitalism, when productive enterprise was frequently initiated through capital saved out of modest incomes.

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.

I think I should know how to educate a boy, but not a girl; I should be in danger of making her too learned.