Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— 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

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves.

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

— 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

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

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

The extension of human sympathies [toward ever-larger communities] has... resulted in the creation of larger units of conflict without abolishing conflict. So civilization has become a device for delegating the vices of individuals to larger and larger communities.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

The naïve faith of the proletarian is the faith of the man of action. Rationality belongs to the cool observers. There is of course an element of illusion in the faith of the proletarian, as there is in all faith. But it is a necessary illusion, without which some truth is obscured. The inertia of society is so stubborn that no one will move against it, if he cannot believe that it can be more easily overcome than is actually the case.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

A Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of the whole Oxford group enterprise from the very beginning. (Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman")

— Reinhold Niebuhr

An irrevocable defeat of a socio-historical cause which gives meaning to the life of the individual must create a complete sense of meaninglessness unless the individual is sustained by a religion which interprets such defeats from the aspect of the eternal.

— 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

There is no level of moral achievement upon which man can have or actually has an easy conscience.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Man does not know himself truly except as he knows himself confronted by God. Only in that confrontation does he become aware of his full stature and freedom and of the evil in him.

— 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

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

God, give us grace to accept with serenity and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

God grant me the serenity and the wisdom to know the difference.

— 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

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

Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.

— 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

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

We Protestants ought to humbly confess that the theater and the sports have done more for race amity, for race understanding than, on the whole, the Protestant Church in certain type, in certain parts of the nation.

— 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

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

One of the fundamental points about religious humility is you say you don't know about the ultimate judgment. It's beyond your judgment. And if you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

— 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

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change,

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

— 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, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

— 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