Reinhold Niebuhr Quotations

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.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. This prayer was first printed in a monthly bulletin of the Federal Council of Churches and has become enormously popular. It has been circulated in millions of copies.

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

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.

If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.

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

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

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

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

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

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

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

Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.

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

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.

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

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

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

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.

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

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.

All known existence points beyond itself.

Better not read books in which you make acquaintance of the devil.

We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.

Man is his own most vexing problem.

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

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.

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.

The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect in his essence. It can only be understood as a self-contradiction, made possible by the fact of his freedom but not following necessarily from it.

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

This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.

To be religious is not to feel, but to be.

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

Liberalism makes this mistake in regard to private property and Marxism makes it in regard to socialized property... The Marxist illusion is partly derived from a romantic conception of human nature... It assumes that the socialization of property will eliminate human egotism... The development of a managerial class in Russia, combing economic with political power, is an historic refutation of the Marxist theory.

Marxism was the social creed and the social cry of those classes who knew by their miseries that the creed of the liberal optimists was s snare and a delusion... Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the "children of light." Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest.

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

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

Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.

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.

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

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.

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

Men have never been individually self-sufficient.

...(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.

God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.

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

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

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

Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.

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

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

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

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

For democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.

To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.

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

We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate.

Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.

The scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested. At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind. The observer of the realm of history cannot be disinterested in the same way, for two reasons: first, he must look at history from some locus in history; secondly, he is to a certain degree engaged in its ideological conflicts.

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 stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control. Since it is impossible to count on enough moral goodwill among those who possess irresponsible power to sacrifice it for the good of the whole, it must be destroyed by coercive methods and these will always run the peril of introducing new forms of injustice in place of those abolished.

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

There are evidently limits to the achievements of science; and there are irresolvable contradictions both between prosperity and virtue, and between happiness and ``the good life,'' which had not been anticipated in our philosophy.

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

The idea that the profits of capital are really the rewards of a just society for the foresight and thrift of those who sacrificed the immediate pleasures of spending in order that society might have productive capital, had a certain validity in the early days of capitalism, when productive enterprise was frequently initiated through capital saved out of modest incomes.

The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment.

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.

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.

Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.

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

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.

Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.

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.

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

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.

Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.

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

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

Even as rigorous a determinist as Karl Marx, who at times described the social behaviour of the bourgeoisie in terms which suggested a problem in social physics, could subject it at other times to a withering scorn which only the presupposition of moral responsibility could justify.

Despotism, which we regard with abhorrence, is rather too plausible in decaying feudal, agrarian, pastoral societies. That's why we must expect to have many a defeat before we'll have an ultimate victory in this contest with Communism.

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

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.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architec75tural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

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

The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.

Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.

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.

It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.

Adam Smith's was a real universalism in intent. Laissez Faire was intended to establish a world community as well as a natural harmony of interests within each nation... But the "children of darkness" were able to make good use of his creed. A dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the "ideology" of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power.

The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.

Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.