Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

We don't properly discriminate. We never discriminate properly when we're dealing with another group and one of the big problems about religion is that religious people don't know that they are probably as flagrant in these misjudgments as irreligious people.

Reinhold Niebuhr
There are evidently limits to the achievements of science; and there are irresolvable contradictions both between prosperity and virtue, and between happiness and the good life, which had not been anticipated in our philosophy. The discovery of these contradictions threatens our culture with despair.

Reinhold Niebuhr
We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about a particular degree of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimatized.

Reinhold Niebuhr
Religion is always a citadel of hope, which is built on the edge of despair.

Reinhold Niebuhr
The modern man is... certain about his essential virtue... [and since] he does not see that he has a freedom of spirit which transcends both nature and reason... [he] is unable to understand the real pathos of his defiance of nature's and reason's laws. He always imagines himself betrayed into this defiance either by some accidental corruption in his past history or by some sloth of reason. Hence he hopes for redemption, either through a program of social reorganization or by some scheme of education.

Reinhold Niebuhr
There were experiences in previous centuries which might well have challenged this unqualified optimism. But the expansion of man's power over nature proceeded at such a pace that all doubts were quieted, allowing the nineteenth century to become the century of hope and to express the modern mood in its most extravagant terms. History, refusing to move by the calendar, actually permitted the nineteenth century to indulge its illusions into the twentieth. Then came the deluge. Since 1914 one tragic experience has followed another, as if history had been designed to refute the vain delusions of modern man.

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

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

Reinhold Niebuhr
Democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.

Reinhold Niebuhr
Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer.... Laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is fulfilled by faith.

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

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 individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.

Reinhold Niebuhr