Murray Kempton

It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that,…

— Murray Kempton

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

— Murray Kempton

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

— Murray Kempton

There is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his…

— Murray Kempton

As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies…

— Murray Kempton

We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.

— Murray Kempton

Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection…

— Murray Kempton

A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent…

— Murray Kempton

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

— Murray Kempton

Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a…

— Murray Kempton

Men very seldom change, try though we will, beneath the shifts of exterior doctrine, our hearts so often remain what they were.

— Murray Kempton

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it…

— Murray Kempton

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

— Murray Kempton

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

— Murray Kempton

There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.

— Murray Kempton

A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to…

— Murray Kempton

To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.

— Murray Kempton

A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.

— Murray Kempton

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed…

— Murray Kempton

“A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war and shoots the injured.”

— Murray Kempton

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by a man incapable of it.

— Murray Kempton

“The fates have a way of demanding of a man that he suffer his greatest moments all by himself; being alone seems…

— Murray Kempton

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

— Murray Kempton

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.

— Murray Kempton

“When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple…

— Murray Kempton