Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes - Page 7

The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.

Now when the historic religions give trivial answers to these very tragic questions of our day, when an evangelist says, for instance, we mustn't hope for a summit meeting, we must hope in Christ without spelling out what this could mean in our particular nuclear age. This is the irrelevant answer, when another Evangelist says if America doesn't stop being selfish, it will be doomed. This is also a childish answer because nations are selfish and the question about America isn't whether we will be selfish or unselfish, but will we be sufficiently imaginative to pass the Reciprocal Trade Acts.

Whenever a church does anything for its own group, it has that right.

All known existence points beyond itself.

I might say that the debate between atheists and Christians is rather stale to me, because the Christians say, "You must be a Christian, or you must be a religious man, in order to be good," and the atheists will say, "It's beneath the dignity of a free man to bow his knee to a god, as if he were a sinner," or something like that.

I think that when we believe that something is right, there's a serious ambivalence about it. On one hand, you say, because it's right, it must be victorious. On the other hand, you say, it's right whether it's victorious or not. And this is what I believe about a free society.

I think there is and ultimate answer in a true religious faith, but it doesn't give you any immediate answers, it doesn't.

A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.

We have to risk a nuclear war in order to escape capitulation to Communism. For all I know, we may stumble into this terrible war.

In the Old Testament, the God of the Prophets never was completely on Israel's side. There was a primitive national religion, but it was always a transcendent God who had judgment first in the House of God. This is the true religion. It has a sense of a transcendent majesty and a transcendent meaning so that that puts myself and the foe under the same judgment.

Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream.

The separation of church and state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn't interfere with the religious vision or with the religious prophet.

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.

Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society. Therefore we have a long history of freedom, where people try to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual - this freedom is necessary for the individual.

That is one of the flagrant misconceptions about Catholicism in America that if a man is a Catholic he owes allegiance to what they say a foreign sovereign, or something like that.

The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.

In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a kind of Protestantism that said, "If you could only get rid of the Bishop, then you'd be a true Christian".

You might get rid of the Bishop and get to the local Ku Klux Klan leader. That, on the whole, has been the fate of certain types of Protestantism. They get under the control of a White Citizens Council while the Catholic Church has an authoritarian system, yes, in which the Bishop expresses the conscience of the whole Christian community and they say there are some things that you can't do on this matter.

I thank heaven I have often had it in my power to give help and relief, and this is still my greatest pleasure. If I could choose my sphere of action now, it would be that of the most simple and direct efforts of this kind.

We misjudge anybody who's different from us and the Jews diverge from our type, ethnically and religiously. That's their chief offense, but there are particular causes.

The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.

I know that the Communists are atheistic and godless, but I don't think that that's what's primarily the matter with them. What's primarily the matter with them is that they worship a false god. That's much more dangerous than when people don't believe anything; they may be confused, they may not have a sense of the meaning of life, but they're not dangerous.

Now the ordinary Protestant, Jew or Secularist has a stereotype about Catholicism. It consists of Spanish Catholicism, Latin-American Catholicism and, let us say, a Catholicism of O'Connor's "Great Hurrah." Now there are types of Catholicism like that but this doesn't - this doesn't do justice to the genuine relation that Catholicism has had to Democratic Society.

History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.

Politics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history, that I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism.