Quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr
The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
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.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
Cheese, wine, and a friend must be old to be good.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
Human Beings are just good enough to make democracy possible...just bad enough to make it neccessary.
- 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
Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky.
- 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 history of mankind is a perennial tragedy; for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
Democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.
- Reinhold Niebuhr