Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible...just bad enough to make it neccessary. — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge. — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled. — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses. — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
“It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
Now we're living in a nuclear age, and the science that was supposed to be automatically for human welfare has become a… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
Liberalism makes this mistake in regard to private property and Marxism makes it in regard to socialized property... The Marxist illusion is… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share Image
There are evidently limits to the achievements of science; and there are irresolvable contradictions both between prosperity and virtue, and between happiness and ''the… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
Perhapsthemost sublimeinsights oftheJewishprophets and the Christian gospel is the knowledge that since perfection is love, the apprehension of perfection is at once the means… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect in his… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
Liberalism makes this mistake in regard to private property and Marxism makes it in regard to socialized property... The Marxist illusion is partly derived… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses. — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
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… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge. — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion. — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream. — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
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… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
...(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures. — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men. — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the… — Reinhold Niebuhr Copy Share
