Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

25 quotes in 424 categories

• ...there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or…
• As the family goes, so go the children.
• The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.
• No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.
• The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.
• Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.
• Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies…
• If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.
• The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
• When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in…
• Secrecy is for losers. . . . It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to…
• The US wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The department of state desired that the UN prove…
• The atmosphere in which social legislation is considered is not a friend of truth.
• There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated…
• It is perhaps common in the world for individuals and nations to suffer for their noble qualities more than for their ignoble ones. For nobility…
• Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
• The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics…
• Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers…
• The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation…
• The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.

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