Reinhold Niebuhr Quotes About Politics

Quotes about: Politics

• Rationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naïve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Average, Stupidity, Politics

• The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Justice, Politics, World

• Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Hypocrisy, Politics, Moral

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2013). “Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics”, p.95, Westminster John Knox Press

• The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Art, Men, Politics

  "Reinhold Niebuhr Is Dead; Protestant Theologian, 78" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, June 2, 1971.

• Liberalism makes this mistake in regard to private property and Marxism makes it in regard to socialized property... The Marxist illusion is partly derived from a romantic conception of human nature... It assumes that the socialization of property will eliminate human egotism... The development of a managerial class in Russia, combing economic with political power, is an historic refutation of the Marxist theory.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Wisdom, Mistake, Russia

• Adam Smith's was a real universalism in intent. Laissez Faire was intended to establish a world community as well as a natural harmony of interests within each nation... But the "children of darkness" were able to make good use of his creed. A dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the "ideology" of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Children, Real, Community

• Marxism was the social creed and the social cry of those classes who knew by their miseries that the creed of the liberal optimists was s snare and a delusion... Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the "children of light." Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Wisdom, Children, Light

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