9 Quotes by H. Richard Niebuhr

Everyone has some kind of philosophy, some general worldview, which to men of other views will seem mythological.

Men are generally right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny. What we deny is generally something that lies outside our experience, and about which we can therefore say nothing.

Nothing is as evanescent in history as the pansophic theories that flourish among the illuminati of all times under the bright sunlight of the latest scientific discoveries; and nothing can be more easily dismissed by later periods as mere speculation.

A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.

A God without wrath brought human beings without sin into a kingdom without judgment through ministrations of a Christ without a cross.

The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there.

Religion makes good people better and bad people worse.

Pilgrims are persons in motion passing through territories not their own, seeking something we might call completion, or perhaps the word clarity will do as well, a goal to which only the spirit’s compass points the way.

Christendom has often achieved apparent success by ignoring the precepts of its founder.