Reinhold Niebuhr Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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 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
Not necessarily every standard that every church tries to enforce upon the society is from the society's standpoint a good standard.

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
O God, give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

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
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