Quotes from 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.

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

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.

Man has always been his own most vexing problem.

Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

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

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

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.

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

The Jews were the money-lenders of the Middle Ages so there's a stereotype of the slightly or more than slightly dishonest business man and this stereotype covers and obscures all the facts.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self-mastery.

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

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

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.

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

If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.

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

The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they're going to do and guarantees them victory; that's why they're fanatic.

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

Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.

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

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.

Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky.

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.