Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes - Page 3

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man's belief in justice that makes democracy possible.

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

The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence, which threaten the very meaning of our life.

Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.

The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they're going to do and guarantees them victory; that's why they're fanatic.

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

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.

The final test of religious faith... is whether it will enable men to endure insecurity without complacency or despair, whether it can so interpret the ancient verities that they will not become mere escape hatches from responsibilities but instruments of insights into what civilization means.

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.

Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible...just bad enough to make it neccessary.

There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or the capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervious to change.

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

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.

I don't know whether any religious leader would say that we must ultimately win, because we're on God's side. If they do say that, it's bad religion.

When a church reaches up beyond its group and tries to enforce its standards upon a society that doesn't accept these standards, and perhaps for good reason, perhaps for bad reason, but anyway this is the problem we face in pluralistic society, that not necessarily every standard that every church tries to enforce upon the society is from the society's standpoint a good standard.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.

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