Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes
-
What is not discussed, will not be advanced.
→ -
The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
→ -
Secrecy is for losers.
→ -
If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing.
→ -
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 of government agencies to do good.
→ -
In too many cases, if our Government had set out determined to destroy the family, it couldn't have done greater damage than some of what we see today.
→ -
If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.
→ -
There are some mistakes only someone with a Ph.D. can make.
→ -
A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years.
→ -
I have no doubt that there will continue to be bumps, some serious crises indeed in our relationship with China.... Neither membership in the WTO nor normalized trade relations with the United States will magically impose the rule of law on China or institute deep-seeded respect for human rights. But it certainly has potential to advance those purposes.
→ -
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 jail.
→ -
We have the right to our own opinions, but not our own facts.
→ -
The status quo is working.
→ -
If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved.
→ -
The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.
→ -
The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do.
→ -
Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.
→ -
To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.
→ -
The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having.
→ -
...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 declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving.
→ -
It has proved politically wiser to set goals than to start programs.
→ -
The Lord looks after drunks and Americans.
→ -
Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no other basis than the complaining question, 'Why wasn't I consulted?'
→ -
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 utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.
→ -
The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.
→ -
I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?
→ -
Things become complicated if there are enough people to complexify them.
→ -
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 by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos.
→ -
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 in the United States.
→ -
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 can change a culture and save it from itself.
→
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
- Born: March 16, 1927
- Died: March 26, 2003
- Occupation: Former United States Senator
Related Authors
-
Nathan Glazer Sociologist -
Irving Kristol Columnist -
E. Franklin Frazier Sociologist -
Charles A. Murray Political Scientist -
Lawrence Kudlow Economist -
Max Baucus United States Ambassador to China -
Hillary Clinton Former United States Secretary of State -
Richard M. Nixon 37th U.S. President -
Rebecca M. Blank Former United States Secretary of Commerce -
Frederick Mosteller Statistician -
Bob Dole American Politician -
Argus Hamilton Comedian -
Tip O'Neill Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives -
Al D'Amato Former United States Senator -
Timothy J. Russert Journalist -
Charles Schumer United States Senator -
William Julius Wilson Sociologist -
E. J. Dionne Journalist -
Drew Gilpin Faust Historian -
Bob Packwood Former United States Senator