Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes on Virtue
Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–43), and The Irony of American History (1952) gave twentieth-century Christian Realist political theology its most influential treatment of the persistent place of self-interest, pride, and collective hypocrisy in the moral life. The central thesis is that the standard liberal-progressive faith in the moral perfectibility of human institutions through education and good will is theologically untenable — original sin, in its specifically Augustinian rather than fundamentalist form, names the structural recurrence of self-deception and the will-to-power in even the most well-intentioned individual and collective action — and the corresponding political ethic is the realist pursuit of the relative justice that finite, fallen agents can actually approximate. The framework shaped postwar American liberal political theology through the Cold War period and remains a principal twentieth-century Christian engagement with the limits of political virtue.
Quotes
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“Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944) -
“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.”
p. 63 -
Attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr:
“Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; pure love without power is destroyed.”
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“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
One of the most commonly quoted forms. -
Attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr:
“The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.”
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“This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.”
p.45 -
“The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch , whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control. Since it is impossible to count on enough moral goodwill among those who possess irresponsible power to sacrifice it for the good of the whole, it must be destroyed by coercive methods and these will always run the peril of introducing new forms of injustice in place of those abolished.”
p.21 -
“Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man . His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life . Reason may extend and stabilise, but it does not create , the capacity to affirm other life than his own.”
Moral Man and Immoral Society(1932) | p.26 -
“The extension of human sympathies [toward ever-larger communities] has... resulted in the creation of larger units of conflict without abolishing conflict. So civilization has become a device for delegating the vices of individuals to larger and larger communities.”
Moral Man and Immoral Society(1932) | p. 49 -
“Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb .”
The Irony of American History(1952)