183 Quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

It's always wise to seek the truth in our opponents' error, and the error in our own truth.

All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.

Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility.

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

A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don't think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indissolubility of the marriage tie.

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

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

It is the evil in man that makes democracy necessary, and man's belief in justice that makes democracy possible.