Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: From J. Bottom (italics mine):

"In a 1932 exchange in Christian Century, prompted by the question of whether the United States should intervene against the Japanese in Manchuria, the well-known Christian ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr wrote of what he called "the grace of doing nothing"--to which his brother, the even-better-known Reinhold Niebuhr, replied that the desire to wait for perfect motives translates into the inability ever to act. Because human beings are what they are, our motives will never reach perfection. We must attempt to do what ought to be done, despite the tangle of our natures, and act most times in imperfection. "