Reinhold Niebuhr

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.

The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.

It were endless to dispute upon everything that is disputable.