The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
REINHOLD NIEBUHRPolitics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history, that I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism.
More Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes
-
-
Certainly, anybody who says, “in the eyes of God,” is pretentious.
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 -
If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR -
Justice requires that we carefully weigh rights and privileges and assure that each member of a community receives his due share. Love does not weigh rights and privileges too carefully because it prompts each to bear the burden of the other.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR -
A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.
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.
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 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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR -
Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR -
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 -
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.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR -
Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR -
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 -
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 -
I’m not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR