Niebuhr’s Relationship to the Past

Egon Schiele, Der Tod und die Frau (1915)

If man does not acknowledge his status as creator, his freedom over the historical flux, his right and duty to challenge the inherited traditions of the community, his obligation to exercise discriminate judgment in rearranging or reconstructing any scheme of togetherness which has been faulty in providing justice, he will merely become the victim of the past which accentuates its vices when it is studiedly preserved into the present.

–Reinhold Niebuhr, The Self and the Dramas of History (1955)