Niebuhr Quotes
Collection of top 87 famous quotes about Niebuhr
Niebuhr Quotes & Sayings
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Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
To be religious is not to feel, but to be.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
All you earnest young men out to save the world ... please, have a laugh.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Christendom has often achieved apparent success by ignoring the precepts of its founder.
— H. Richard Niebuhr
Everyone has some kind of philosophy, some general worldview, which to men of other views will seem mythological.
— H. Richard Niebuhr
Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
As racial, economic and national groups, they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Religion makes good people better and bad people worse.
— H. Richard Niebuhr
There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Poets are light amidst darkness
— Jill Niebuhr
Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Man is his own most vexing problem.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change,
he courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference. — Reinhold Niebuhr
he courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference. — Reinhold Niebuhr
Better not read books in which you make acquaintance of the devil.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
A republic properly understood is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
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.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
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.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Men have never been individually self-sufficient.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
I think I should know how to educate a boy, but not a girl; I should be in danger of making her too learned.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Until the fear of catastrophe amends, or catastrophe itself destroys ...
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
There can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection.
— Gustav Niebuhr
Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The evils against which we contend are frequently the fruits of illusions which are similar to our own.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Change is the essence of life; be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really appreciate the meaning of the cross.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Humor is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
He who calls what has vanished back into being, enjoys a bliss like that of creating
— Barthold Niebuhr
Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
We must fight their falsehood with our truth, but we must also fight the falsehood in our truth.
— H. Richard Niebuhr
It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man's belief in justice that makes democracy possible.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible ... just bad enough to make it neccessary.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
It's always wise to seek the truth in our opponents' error, and the error in our own truth.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Forgiveness is the final form of love.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
I'm not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.
— H. Richard Niebuhr
Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.
— Reinhold Niebuhr