Reinhold Niebuhr quotes - page 3

Reinhold Niebuhr was an influential American theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual. Known for his work in Christian realism and his reflections on the nature of power and human morality, he deeply shaped 20th-century political and religious thought. He is perhaps best remembered for the "Serenity Prayer" and his analysis of the complexities of justice. Here are 102 of his quotes:

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

Reinhold Niebuhr

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

Reinhold Niebuhr

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

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

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

Reinhold Niebuhr

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.

Reinhold Niebuhr

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.

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

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

Reinhold Niebuhr

A Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of the whole Oxford group enterprise from the very beginning.

Reinhold Niebuhr

The final sin of man, said Luther truly, is his unwillingness to concede that he is a sinner. The significant contribution of modern culture to this perennial human inclination lies in the number of plausible reasons which it was able to adduce in support of man's good opinion of himself.

Reinhold Niebuhr

[The value and dignity of the individual] is threatened whenever it is assumed that individual desires, hopes and ideals can be fitted with frictionless harmony into the collective purposes of man. The individual is not discrete. He cannot find his fulfillment outside of the community; but he also cannot find fulfillment completely within society. In so far as he finds fulfillment within society he must abate his individual ambitions. He must 'die to self' if he would truly live. In so far as he finds fulfillment beyond every historical community he lives his life in painful tension with even the best community, sometimes achieving standards of conduct which defy the standards of the community with a resolute "we must obey God rather than man."

Reinhold Niebuhr

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.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Every society will have to maintain methods of arbitrating conflicting needs to the end of history; and in that process those who are shrewder will gain some advantage over the simple, even if they should lack special instruments of power.

Reinhold Niebuhr

If the man of power were to take a message of absolute honesty and absolute love seriously he would lose his power, or would divest himself of it.

Reinhold Niebuhr

The fact that the prevailing mood of modern culture was able to transmute the original pessimism of romanticism into an optimistic creed proves the power of this mood.

Reinhold Niebuhr

The redemption of mankind, by whatever means, was assured for the future. It was, in fact, assured by the future.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Human existence is obviously distinguished from animal life by its qualified participation in creation. Within limits it breaks the forms of nature and creates new configurations of vitality.

Reinhold Niebuhr

I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life.

Reinhold Niebuhr

comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.

Reinhold Niebuhr

We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.

Reinhold Niebuhr