Quote

The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Reinhold Niebuhr
Age: 78 †
Born: 1892
Born: June 21
Died: 1971
Died: June 1
Ethicist
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Theologian
University Teacher
Wright City
Missouri
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
Becomes
Power
Live

More quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

Image
[There is] an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
The Jews were the money-lenders of the Middle Ages so there's a stereotype of the slightly or more than slightly dishonest business man and this stereotype covers and obscures all the facts.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
The significance of the law of love is precisely that it is not just another law, but a law which transcends all law.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
No nation can say, 'We will capitulate to tyranny rather than accept a speculative fate - to accept an absolute fate in alternative to a speculative one' - no nation can do that.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
That is one of the flagrant misconceptions about Catholicism in America that if a man is a Catholic he owes allegiance to what they say a foreign sovereign, or something like that.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
We don't properly discriminate. We never discriminate properly when we're dealing with another group and one of the big problems about religion is that religious people don't know that they are probably as flagrant in these misjudgments as irreligious people.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Not only in America but in Germany, in France since the war, in Germany after the First World War, the Germany of Adenauer, these are the creative relationships of Catholicism to a free society that the average American doesn't fully appreciate.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
The essence of man is his freedom. Sin is committed in that freedom. Sin can therefore not be attributed to a defect in his essence. It can only be understood as a self-contradiction, made possible by the fact of his freedom but not following necessarily from it.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
I'm not afraid of too many things, and I got that invincible kind of attitude from my father.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
We have to risk a nuclear war in order to escape capitulation to Communism. For all I know, we may stumble into this terrible war.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
There has been a religious revival because - let me put it like this, the people that weren't traditionally religious, conventionally religious, had a religion of their own in my youth. These were liberals who believed in the idea of progress or they were Marxists. Both of these secular religions have broken down.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Nationalism: One of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life's ethical problems.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Image
Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.
Reinhold Niebuhr