Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

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

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
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

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. Its transcendence over natural process offers it the opportunity of interfering with the established forms and unities of vitality as nature knows them.

Reinhold Niebuhr
There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.

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

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

Reinhold Niebuhr
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.

Reinhold Niebuhr
The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect in his essence. It can only be understood as a self-contradiction, made possible by the fact of his freedom but not following necessarily from it.

Reinhold Niebuhr
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.

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 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.

Reinhold Niebuhr
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.

Reinhold Niebuhr
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.

Reinhold Niebuhr
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.

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

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
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.

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

Reinhold Niebuhr
Despotism, which we regard with abhorrence, is rather too plausible in decaying feudal, agrarian, pastoral societies. That's why we must expect to have many a defeat before we'll have an ultimate victory in this contest with Communism.

Reinhold Niebuhr
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.

Reinhold Niebuhr
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

Reinhold Niebuhr
My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them." 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. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends.

Reinhold Niebuhr
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.

Reinhold Niebuhr
The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries. Historical communities are, in short, more deeply involved in nature and time than the individual.

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

Reinhold Niebuhr
Our gadget-filled paradise suspended in a hell of international insecurity.

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