Reinhold Niebuhr
Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility.Collection: Life
Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.Collection: Simple
Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.Collection: Accepted
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.Collection: Children
All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.Collection: Religious
All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.Collection: Men
The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one.Collection: Conquer The World
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.Collection: Tragedy
Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.Collection: Wine
Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.Collection: Wisdom
The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.Collection: Will Power
We don't properly discriminate. We never discriminate properly when we're dealing with another group and one of the big problems about religion is that religious people don't know that they are probably as flagrant in these misjudgments as irreligious people.Collection: Religious
All you earnest young men out to save the world. . . please, have a laugh.Collection: Laughter
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.Collection: Laughter
All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.Collection: Groups
The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.Collection: Groups
As racial, economic and national groups, they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.Collection: Groups
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.Collection: Life
The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet.Collection: Doe
The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.Collection: Real
It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man's belief in justice that makes democracy possible.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Victory
The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence, which threaten the very meaning of our life.Collection: Laughter
Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Religious
While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves.Collection: Rights
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.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Religious
I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits - the relevant fruits - are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice.Collection: Men
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 for good reason, perhaps for bad reason, but anyway this is the problem we face in pluralistic society, that not necessarily every standard that every church tries to enforce upon the society is from the society's standpoint a good standard.Collection: Church
We Protestants ought to humbly confess that the theater and the sports have done more for race amity, for race understanding than, on the whole, the Protestant Church in certain type, in certain parts of the nation.Collection: Sports
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.Collection: Strong
Great talents have some admirers, but few friends.Collection: Few Friends
There must be a realm of truth beyond political competence, that's why there must be a separation of churches, but if religion is bad and a bad religion is one that gives an ultimate sanctity to some particular cause.Collection: Giving
Nothing worth doing can be accomplished in a single lifetime.Collection: Single Life
Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.Collection: Modern
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Change
All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point; it's a rather vapid form of religion.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Wisdom
There has been a religious revival because - let me put it like this, the people that weren't traditionally religious, conventionally religious, had a religion of their own in my youth. These were liberals who believed in the idea of progress or they were Marxists. Both of these secular religions have broken down.Collection: Religious
Now we're living in a nuclear age, and the science that was supposed to be automatically for human welfare has become a nuclear - a science that gives us nuclear weapons. This is the ironic character of human history, and of human existence, which I can only explain, if I say so, in Biblical terms. Now I don't mean by this reason that I will accept every interpretation of Christianity that's derived from the Bible as many people wouldn't accept my interpretation. But that's what it means for me.Collection: Character
For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.Collection: Men
History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.Collection: Natural
Faith is the final triumph over incongruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of existence.Collection: Triumph
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.Collection: Science