Reinhold Niebuhr
Reinhold Niebuhr
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhrwas an American theologian, ethicist, commentator on politics and public affairs, and professor at Union Theological Seminary for more than 30 years. The brother of another prominent theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr, he is also known for having composed the Serenity Prayer, He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Among his most influential books are Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man, the second of which Modern Library ranked one of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionReligious Leader
Date of Birth21 June 1892
CountryUnited States of America
There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.
If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.
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.
Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.
Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
Men have never been individually self-sufficient.
...(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.
God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.
All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.
As racial, economic and national groups, they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.
For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.
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.