110+ Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes On Democracy, Social Justice Advocacy And Accept

Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian, philosopher, and political theorist. He is best known for his work on Christian ethics and his development of the Serenity Prayer. Niebuhr was a major influence on the development of neo-orthodoxy, a theological movement in Protestant Christianity. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr on democracy, social justice advocacy, accept.

Top 10 Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes

1. 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.
2. Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
3. Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.
4. Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.
5. There was a time when I had all the answers. My real growth began when I discovered that the questions to which I had the answers were not the important questions.
6. Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.
7. Forgiveness is the final form of love.
8. 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.
9. Humor is a prelude to faith and laughter is the beginning of prayer.
10. All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.

Reinhold Niebuhr Image Quotes

Humor is a prelude to faith and laughter is the beginning of prayer. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr Short Quotes

• All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.
• The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.
• If we survive danger it steels our courage more than anything else.
• Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
• Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
• Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.
• The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
• The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
• Marxism is the modern form of Jewish prophecy.
• Men have never been individually self-sufficient.

Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes About Democracy

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

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

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

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

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems. — Reinhold Niebuhr

It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man's belief in justice that makes democracy possible. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes About Accept

God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

No nation can say, 'We will capitulate to tyranny rather than accept a speculative fate - to accept an absolute fate in alternative to a speculative one' - no nation can do that. — Reinhold Niebuhr

God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed;Give me courage to change things which must be changed;And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes About Saved

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

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

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

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

Reinhold Niebuhr Famous Quotes And Sayings

Humor is a prelude to faith and laughter is the beginning of prayer. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. Grant me the patience with changes that take time, appreciation of all that I have, tolerance of those with different struggles, and the strength to get up and try again, one day at a time. — Reinhold Niebuhr

The cross symbolizes a cosmic as well as historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one. — Reinhold Niebuhr

[There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups. — Reinhold Niebuhr

The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

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

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

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

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

Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

I think I have one answer, that is partly religious and partly secular; and that is to say, we ought to at least recognize that we and the Russians are in a common predicament. That would be religious in the sense, "Judge not lest you be judged." — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

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

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

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

Great talents have some admirers, but few friends. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

I think that the Christian faith is right as against simple forms of secularism. That it believes that there is in man a radical freedom, and this freedom is creative but it is also destructive. And there's nothing that prevents this from being both creative and destructive. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

There must be equality of all men before God and in a democratic society. Now that's one of the great achievements. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Certainly, anybody who says, "in the eyes of God," is pretentious. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

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

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

I think that the achievements of Catholicism on race are very, very impressive. — Reinhold Niebuhr

That is the truth about man - that he has a curious kind of dignity, but also a curious kind of misery, and that these forms of agnosticism don't understand. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with HimForever in the next. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

We ought to really at least recognize the common predicament of Communists and democrats - or Americans, whatever. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Politics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history, that I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

To be religious is not to feel, but to be. — Reinhold Niebuhr

The churches that are most obviously democratic are most obviously given to race prejudice. I mean the churches that have absolute congregational control. — Reinhold Niebuhr

The fanatic is dangerous. — Reinhold Niebuhr

If you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Not only in America but in Germany, in France since the war, in Germany after the First World War, the Germany of Adenauer, these are the creative relationships of Catholicism to a free society that the average American doesn't fully appreciate. — Reinhold Niebuhr

All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point; it's a rather vapid form of religion. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

You can't say that religion or irreligion will give us a particular answer to the nuclear dilemma. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

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

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Where, but in the simplicity of the Gospel, can you hear about both the dignity of man and the misery of man? — Reinhold Niebuhr

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". — Reinhold Niebuhr

All known existence points beyond itself. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Ultimately freedom is necessary for a society, because every despotic society - for instance, the Russian society - lives on the basis of a rather implausible dogma - the Marxist dogma of world redemption through Communism. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

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

Whenever a church does anything for its own group, it has that right. — Reinhold Niebuhr

The nuclear age has refuted the idea of progress and Marxism has been refuted by Stalinism. Therefore people have returned to the historic religion. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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

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

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun. — Reinhold Niebuhr

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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime;Therefore, we must be saved by hope.Nothing which is 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, could be accomplished alone;Therefore, we must be 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. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Life Lessons by Reinhold Niebuhr

1. Reinhold Niebuhr taught that humility and grace are essential for living a meaningful life, and that we must accept our limitations and strive for justice and compassion.
2. He believed that we should strive to be agents of change in our society, but also to accept our own limitations and the limits of human nature.
3. He also emphasized the importance of faith and prayer as a way to find strength and guidance in difficult times.