Reinhold Niebuhr

There are evidently limits to the achievements of science; and there are irresolvable contradictions both between prosperity and virtue, and between happiness…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Perhapsthemost sublimeinsights oftheJewishprophets and the Christian gospel is the knowledge that since perfection is love, the apprehension of perfection is at once…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Liberalism makes this mistake in regard to private property and Marxism makes it in regard to socialized property... The Marxist illusion is…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

When a church reaches up beyond its group and tries to enforce its standards upon a society that doesn't accept these standards,…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

...(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

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

We Protestants ought to humbly confess that the theater and the sports have done more for race amity, for race understanding than,…

— 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

We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Civilization depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who are intelligent enough to know that their values are…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Now when the historic religions give trivial answers to these very tragic questions of our day, when an evangelist says, for instance,…

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true…

— Reinhold Niebuhr