Top 120 Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The morality of the church is anachronistic. Will it ever develop a moral insight and courage sufficient to cope with the real problems of modern society? If it does it will require generations of effort and not a few martyrdoms. We ministers maintain our pride and self-respect and our sense of importance only through a vast and inclusive ignorance. If we knew the world in which we live a little better we would perish in shame or be overcome by a sense of futility.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

103. “To be religious is not to feel, but to be.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

105. “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.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

106. “A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don’t think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indissolubility of the marriage tie.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

108. “However much human ingenuity may increase the treasures which nature provides for the satisfaction of human needs, they can never be sufficient to satisfy all human wants; for man, unlike other creatures, is gifted and cursed with an imagination which extends his appetites beyond the requirements of subsistence. Human.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

109. “Power,” said Henry Adams, “is poison”; and it is a poison which blinds the eyes of moral insight and lames the will of moral purpose. The.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

110. “If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our present civilization.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

112. “I’m not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

113. “I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really appreciate the meaning of the cross.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

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

— Reinhold Niebuhr

115. “The church has lost the chance of becoming the unifying element in our American society. It is not anticipating any facts. It is merely catching up very slowly to the new social facts created by economic and other forces. The American melting pot is doing its work. The churches merely represent various European cultures, lost in the amalgam of American life and maintaining a separate existence only in religion.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

116. “When economic power desires to be left alone it uses the philosophy of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon economic freedom. When it wants to make use of the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its helots, it justifies the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of liberties by insisting that peace is more precious than freedom and that its only desire is social peace.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

117. “Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

118. “There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

119. “Every profession has its traditions and its traditionalists. But the traditionalists in the pulpit are much more certain than the others that the Lord is on their side.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

120. “Men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

121. “I regret the immaturity with which I approached the problems and tasks of the ministry but I do not regret the years devoted to the parish.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

122. “The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

123. “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

124. “Power,” he wrote, “always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

125. “The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

126. “My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: “By their fruits shall ye know them.” 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. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

127. “The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the “happiness of mankind” as its promise.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

128. “The highest type of leadership maintains itself by its intrinsic worth, sans panoply, pomp and power. Of course, there are never enough real leaders to go around. Wherefore it becomes necessary to dress some men up and by other artificial means to give them a prestige and a power which they could not win by their own resources.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

129. “Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their own deceptions. Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

130. “Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their own deceptions. Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are most convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr

131. “The intelligent man, who exploits available resources for knowledge of the needs and wants of his fellows, will be more inclined to adjust his conduct to their needs than those who are less intelligent.”

— Reinhold Niebuhr