Max Lerner Quotes

61 quotes in 895 categories

• The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
• In the end, as any successful teacher will tell you, you can only teach the things that you are. If we practice racism then it…
• Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in…
• America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.
• I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.
• There are almost no limits to the discoveries of how the human brain operates in illness and health, in sleep and waking and dreaming, in…
• Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
• Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.
• God is what man finds that is divine in himself. It is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and…
• In our culture we make heroes of the men who sit on top of a heap of money, and we pay attention not only to…
• It is not the armed forces which can protect our democracy. It is the moral strength of democracy which alone can give any meaning to…
• Power politics existed before Machiavelli was ever heard of; it will exist long after his name is only a faint memory. What he did, like…
• A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.
• You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.
• Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.
• When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
• The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.
• Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering…
• The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail…
• Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.

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