Reinhold Niebuhr
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.Collection: Art
Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses.Collection: Selfish
Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky.Collection: Stars
I'm not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.Collection: Attitude
I think I should know how to educate a boy, but not a girl; I should be in danger of making her too learned.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Believe
I think that the achievements of Catholicism on race are very, very impressive.Collection: Thinking
The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.Collection: Eye
Now when the historic religions give trivial answers to these very tragic questions of our day, when an evangelist says, for instance, we mustn't hope for a summit meeting, we must hope in Christ without spelling out what this could mean in our particular nuclear age. This is the irrelevant answer, when another Evangelist says if America doesn't stop being selfish, it will be doomed. This is also a childish answer because nations are selfish and the question about America isn't whether we will be selfish or unselfish, but will we be sufficiently imaginative to pass the Reciprocal Trade Acts.Collection: Selfish
Whenever a church does anything for its own group, it has that right.Collection: Church
All known existence points beyond itself.Collection: Existence
I might say that the debate between atheists and Christians is rather stale to me, because the Christians say, "You must be a Christian, or you must be a religious man, in order to be good," and the atheists will say, "It's beneath the dignity of a free man to bow his knee to a god, as if he were a sinner," or something like that.Collection: Christian
I think that when we believe that something is right, there's a serious ambivalence about it. On one hand, you say, because it's right, it must be victorious. On the other hand, you say, it's right whether it's victorious or not. And this is what I believe about a free society.Collection: Believe
We misjudge anybody who's different from us and the Jews diverge from our type, ethnically and religiously. That's their chief offense, but there are particular causes.Collection: Causes
I think there is and ultimate answer in a true religious faith, but it doesn't give you any immediate answers, it doesn't.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Arrows
A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.Collection: Mysterious
We have to risk a nuclear war in order to escape capitulation to Communism. For all I know, we may stumble into this terrible war.Collection: War
The separation of church and state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn't interfere with the religious vision or with the religious prophet.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Simple
The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.Collection: Drama
The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control.Collection: Mean
You might get rid of the Bishop and get to the local Ku Klux Klan leader. That, on the whole, has been the fate of certain types of Protestantism. They get under the control of a White Citizens Council while the Catholic Church has an authoritarian system, yes, in which the Bishop expresses the conscience of the whole Christian community and they say there are some things that you can't do on this matter.Collection: Christian
In the Old Testament, the God of the Prophets never was completely on Israel's side. There was a primitive national religion, but it was always a transcendent God who had judgment first in the House of God. This is the true religion. It has a sense of a transcendent majesty and a transcendent meaning so that that puts myself and the foe under the same judgment.Collection: Israel
I know that the Communists are atheistic and godless, but I don't think that that's what's primarily the matter with them. What's primarily the matter with them is that they worship a false god. That's much more dangerous than when people don't believe anything; they may be confused, they may not have a sense of the meaning of life, but they're not dangerous.Collection: Confused
Now the ordinary Protestant, Jew or Secularist has a stereotype about Catholicism. It consists of Spanish Catholicism, Latin-American Catholicism and, let us say, a Catholicism of O'Connor's "Great Hurrah." Now there are types of Catholicism like that but this doesn't - this doesn't do justice to the genuine relation that Catholicism has had to Democratic Society.Collection: Latin
That is one of the flagrant misconceptions about Catholicism in America that if a man is a Catholic he owes allegiance to what they say a foreign sovereign, or something like that.Collection: Men
Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream.Collection: Dream
In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a kind of Protestantism that said, "If you could only get rid of the Bishop, then you'd be a true Christian".Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Men
History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.Collection: Law
Aim for the stars and maybe you’ll reach the sky.Collection: Sky