Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on Injustice and Loving Our Enemies)

“To love our enemies cannot mean that we must connive with their injustice. It does mean that beyond all moral distinctions of history we must know ourselves one with our enemies not only in the bonds of common humanity but also in the bonds of common guilt by which that humanity has become corrupted.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “Our Responsibilities in 1942,” Christianity and Crisis, Jan. 12, 1942

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on ‘The Children of Light’)

“The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (1944)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on How Envy and Fear Produce Hatred)

“The irresponsibility which power creates corrupts judgment and accentuates the natural tendency toward selfish conduct. Meanwhile the special privileges which the powerful always claim for themselves excite the envy, as their power prompts the fear, of those who deal with them. When envy and fear are compounded they produce hatred. If this hatred in the hearts of the weak is frustrated for a time by their impotence, it usually united them into a confederacy of power in the end.”—American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “Perils of American Power,” originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1932, reprinted in The American Idea: The Best of “The Atlantic Monthly” (2007)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on the Gospel and ‘Heroic Devotion’)

“The gospel commits us to positions which require heroic devotion before they will ever be realized in life. But we are astute rather than heroic and cautious rather than courageous.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on How We Are Saved by Faith, Hope and Love)

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), The Irony of American History (1952)

Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on Race Pride as ‘A Perennial Corruption of Man's Collective Life’)

“If we imagine that race pride is only a vestigial remnant of barbarism, which civilization is in the process of sloughing off; if we do not understand it as a perennial corruption of man's collective life on every level of social and moral achievement, we are bound to follow wrong policies in dealing with specific aspects of the problem. An engineer who dammed up an ocean inlet under the illusion that he was dealing with a mountain stream would be no more foolish than our social engineers who are constantly underestimating the force and the character of the social stuff that they are manipulating.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, edited by D. B. Robertson (1957)

Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on the Limits Placed by ‘Inordinate Self-Love’)

“[N]o matter how wide the perspectives which the human mind may reach, how broad the loyalties which the human imagination may conceive, how universal the community which human statecraft may organize, or how pure the aspirations of the saintliest idealists may be, there is no level of human moral or social achievement in which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love.” — American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (1944)

Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, Praying Amid ‘The Sorry Confusion of Our World’)

“Lord, we pray this day mindful of the sorry confusion of our world. Look with mercy upon this generation of your children so steeped in misery of their own contriving, so far strayed from your ways and so blinded by passions. We pray for the victims of tyranny, that they may resist oppression with courage and may preserve their integrity by a hope which defies the terror of the moment. We pray for wicked and cruel men, whose arrogance reveals to us what the sin of our own hearts is like when it has conceived and brought forth its final fruit. O God, who resists the proud and gives grace to the humble, bring down the mighty from their seats.”—American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “Prayers,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics (Library of America edition, 2015)

Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on Why Democracy Is Possible and Necessary)

“Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”—American theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness,” in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses (1986)

Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on How We Are ‘Saved by Love’)

“Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.”—Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952)