Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes

The ice is not very thick; the ocean beneath it is deep and tempestuous; and the sun above is warm and melting.

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, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

Passing one of our big churches today I ran across this significant slogan, calculated to impress the passing wayfarer: 'We Will Go Out of Business. When? When Every Man in Detroit Has Been Won to Christ.' Of course it is just a slogan and not to be taken too seriously, but the whole weakness of Protestantism is in it. Here we are living in a complex world in which thousands who have been 'won to Christ' haven't the slightest notion how to live a happy life or how to live together with other people without making each other miserable [1928].

Liberal democracy is worth defending, not because it fulfills a moral ideal or because modern civilized types deserve nothing less, but because it is the best way to restrain human egotism and will-to-power.

It is the nature of a business community that it deals with the covert forms of power in economic life and to be insensible to the significance and the complexity of more overt forms of power, even as it is insensible to the motive of the lust for power as an element in human nature.

it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.

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.
the one from the other.