Murray Kempton Quotes

24 quotes in 386 categories

• A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess that it…
• The fates have a way of demanding of a man that he suffer his greatest moments all by himself; being lone seems as often attendant…
• It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.
• A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.
• A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.
• Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment…
• By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family…
• To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an…
• A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.
• No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.
• The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.
• The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.
• It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time…
• As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in…
• The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.
• To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.
• It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.
• There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.
• A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.
• Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.

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