Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

Quotes about:

• You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Facts, Opinion, Entitled

  218 Copy quote

• Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Education, Truth, Freedom

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Steven R. Weisman (2010). “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary”, p.2, PublicAffairs

  112 Copy quote

• 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.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Relationship, Growing Up, Women

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1996). “Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy”, p.152, Harvard University Press

  125 Copy quote

• 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.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Agency, Government, Healthy

  74 Copy quote

• The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Government, Political, Liberty

  91 Copy quote

• To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Heart, World, Break

  106 Copy quote

• 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.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Taken, Past, Welfare Programs

  64 Copy quote

• 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

  Change, Society, Culture

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1996). “Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy”, p.63, Harvard University Press

  36 Copy quote

• Marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each
  other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children's prospects.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Family, Marriage, Children

  77 Copy quote

• The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Force, American Life, Left

  33 Copy quote

• 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 which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Thinking, Perfect, Hopeful

  24 Copy quote

• There are some mistakes only someone with a Ph.D. can make.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Mistake

  37 Copy quote

• A responsible government does not triple the national debt in eight years.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Responsible Government, Eight, Years

  Source: articles.latimes.com

  10 Copy quote

• I'm a Democrat, and there are an important group of things only the government can do. But let us be clear that for most of the world, what they most need is less government.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Government, Important, World

  Source: articles.latimes.com

  56 Copy quote

• The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Debtors, World, Distinction

  Source: articles.latimes.com

  4 Copy quote

• I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Radical, Robber Baron, Robbers

  45 Copy quote

• The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Men, Capacity To Love, Understanding

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1987). “Family and Nation: The Godkin Lectures, Harvard University”, Harcourt

  43 Copy quote

• If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Country, Jail, People

  56 Copy quote

• 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.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Government, Done, Today

  17 Copy quote

• The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Country, Rights, Numbers

  15 Copy quote

• What is not discussed, will not be advanced.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  7 Copy quote

• The American Constitution was designed to make it hard to have too much government.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Government, Too Much, Constitution

  Source: articles.latimes.com

  34 Copy quote

• The principal objective of American government at every level should be to
  see that children are born into intact families and that they remain so.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Marriage, Children, Government

  42 Copy quote

• One ideological claim is that private property is theft, that the natural product of the existence of property is evil, and that private ownership therefore should not exist... What those who feel this way don't realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control - that property is a system for the disposal of power. The absence of property almost always means the concentration of power in the state.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Mean, Evil, Politics

  22 Copy quote

• To strip our past of glory is no great loss, but to deny it honor is devastating.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Loss, Past, Honor

  15 Copy quote

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