Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes

All you earnest young men out to save the world. . . please, have a laugh.

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.

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

What is so funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously. Laughter is the same and healthy response to the innocent foibles of men; and even to some which are not innocent.

What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously.

Man is both strong and weak, both free and bound, both blind and far-seeing. He stands at the juncture of nature and spirit; and is involved in both freedom and necessity.

Certainly, anybody who says, "in the eyes of God," is pretentious.

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

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

There must be equality of all men before God and in a democratic society. Now that's one of the great achievements.

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.

A republic properly understood is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will.

I cannot worship the abstractions of virtue: she only charms me when she addresses herself to my heart, speaks through the love from which she springs.

We ought to really at least recognize the common predicament of Communists and democrats - or Americans, whatever.

That is the truth about man - that he has a curious kind of dignity, but also a curious kind of misery, and that these forms of agnosticism don't understand.

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

Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky.

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

I think that the achievements of Catholicism on race are very, very impressive.

We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.

The history of mankind is a perennial tragedy; for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.

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.

The fence and the boundary line are the symbols of the spirit of justice. They set the limits upon each man's interest to prevent one from taking advantage of the other.

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

I'm not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.

I think I should know how to educate a boy, but not a girl; I should be in danger of making her too learned.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Civilization depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their interests and corrupted by their prejudices.

Man has always been his own most vexing problem.

Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

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

Where, but in the simplicity of the Gospel, can you hear about both the dignity of man and the misery of man?

The fanatic is dangerous.

The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.

The Jews were the money-lenders of the Middle Ages so there's a stereotype of the slightly or more than slightly dishonest business man and this stereotype covers and obscures all the facts.

All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point; it's a rather vapid form of religion.

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

The nuclear age has refuted the idea of progress and Marxism has been refuted by Stalinism. Therefore people have returned to the historic religion.

Religion mustn't interfere with the state - so one of the basic Democratic principles as we know it in America is the separation of church and state.

Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.

History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.

Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.

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