Reinhold Niebuhr quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr on Wise Famous Quotes.

Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.

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

To be religious is not to feel, but to be.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

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

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

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

Better not read books in which you make acquaintance of the devil.

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

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

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

Man is his own most vexing problem.

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.

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

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

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

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

If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.

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

All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.

God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

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

A republic properly understood is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will.

Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.

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.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

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

All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.

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.

Men have never been individually self-sufficient.

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

The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.

Until the fear of catastrophe amends, or catastrophe itself destroys ...

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

There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them.

It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.

The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.

Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.

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

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

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

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

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

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

For democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.

The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

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

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

The evils against which we contend are frequently the fruits of illusions which are similar to our own.

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

I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really appreciate the meaning of the cross.

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.

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

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

Humor is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer.

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.

Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.

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

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

Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility.

Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.

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

Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible ... just bad enough to make it neccessary.

Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.

It's always wise to seek the truth in our opponents' error, and the error in our own truth.

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

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

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

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

Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.

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

The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.

Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.

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

Change is the essence of life; be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.