Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously.

Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.

Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.

All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.

You can't say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma.

Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.

[There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.

Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky.

There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.

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 which leads to death has already begun.

The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.

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.

Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.

Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.

A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.

As racial, economic and national groups, they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.

I might say that the debate between atheists and Christians is rather stale to me, because the Christians say, "You must be a Christian, or you must be a religious man, in order to be good," and the atheists will say, "It's beneath the dignity of a free man to bow his knee to a god, as if he were a sinner," or something like that.

Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.

We misjudge anybody who's different from us and the Jews diverge from our type, ethnically and religiously. That's their chief offense, but there are particular causes.

I thank heaven I have often had it in my power to give help and relief, and this is still my greatest pleasure. If I could choose my sphere of action now, it would be that of the most simple and direct efforts of this kind.

Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.

We Protestants ought to humbly confess that the theater and the sports have done more for race amity, for race understanding than, on the whole, the Protestant Church in certain type, in certain parts of the nation.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.

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.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. This prayer was first printed in a monthly bulletin of the Federal Council of Churches and has become enormously popular. It has been circulated in millions of copies.

The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.

Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society. Therefore we have a long history of freedom, where people try to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual - this freedom is necessary for the individual.

We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.

This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.

The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.

The fence and the boundary line are the symbols of the spirit of justice. They set the limits upon each man's interest to prevent one from taking advantage of the other.

Certainly, anybody who says, "in the eyes of God," is pretentious.

To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.

Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth.

Civilization depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their interests and corrupted by their prejudices.

Marxism was the social creed and the social cry of those classes who knew by their miseries that the creed of the liberal optimists was s snare and a delusion... Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the "children of light." Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest.

Rationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naïve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.

Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.

The dimension of depth in the consciousness of religion creates the tension between what is and what ought to be. It bends the bow from which every arrow of moral action flies.

When a church reaches up beyond its group and tries to enforce its standards upon a society that doesn't accept these standards, and perhaps for good reason, perhaps for bad reason, but anyway this is the problem we face in pluralistic society, that not necessarily every standard that every church tries to enforce upon the society is from the society's standpoint a good standard.

I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits - the relevant fruits - are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice.

All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point; it's a rather vapid form of religion.

It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man's belief in justice that makes democracy possible.

Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends.

All you earnest young men out to save the world. . . please, have a laugh.

Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architec75tural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.