Top 120 Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

52. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

54. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

55. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

56. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

58. “Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

59. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

63. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

64. “Men have never been individually self-sufficient.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

65. “Since the survival impulse in nature is transmuted into two different and contradictory spiritualized forms, which we may briefly designate as the will-to-live-truly and the will-to-power, man is at variance with himself. The power of the second impulse places him more fundamentally in conflict with his fellowman than democratic liberalism realizes.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

68. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

71. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

73. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

74. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

78. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

79. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

81. “It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man’s belief in justice that makes democracy possible.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

82. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

88. “A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural 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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

89. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

90. “All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

92. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

93. “It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

94. “There is no deeper pathos in the spiritual life of man than the cruelty of righteous people. If any one idea dominates the teachings of Jesus, it is his opposition to the self-righteousness of the righteous.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

95. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

96. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

98. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

100. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr