Max Lerner Quotes - Page 2

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• America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.

  Max Lerner

  Men, Ideas, America

  4 Copy quote

• The Russians train; they do not dare educate.

  Max Lerner

  Dare, Educate, Train

  Max Lerner (1959). “The Unfinished Country”

  4 Copy quote

• Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.

  Max Lerner

  Humanity, Enemy, Privilege

  5 Copy quote

• In societies like the American and West European where the dynamics of energy come from freedom and where the climate and the whole ethos are those of freedom, censorship is bound to be at worst, stupid; at best, futile; and always, to some degree, inconsonant with the character of the society as a whole.

  Max Lerner

  Stupid, Character, Ethos

  4 Copy quote

• Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.

  Max Lerner

  Pay

  4 Copy quote

• 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 getting there - or failing to get there.

  Max Lerner

  Congratulations, Men, Best Effort

  Max Lerner (1959). “The unfinished country: a book of American symbols”

  9 Copy quote

• We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.

  Max Lerner

  Perfection, Political, Demand

  4 Copy quote

• It is not science that has destroyed the world, despite all the gloomy forebodings of the earlier prophets. It is man who has destroyed man.

  Max Lerner

  Men, World, Destruction

  4 Copy quote

• There are some who become spies for money, or out of vanity and megalomania, or out of ambition, or out of a desire for thrills. But the malady of our time is of those who become spies out of idealism.

  Max Lerner

  Ambition, Vanity, Spy

  Max Lerner (1959). “The unfinished country: a book of American symbols”

  20 Copy quote

• Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.

  Max Lerner

  Ignorance, Men, Civilization

  Max Lerner (1959). “The Unfinished Country”

  4 Copy quote

• When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.

  Max Lerner

  Teenage, Serious, Adolescence

  23 Copy quote

• A religion which has lost its basic conviction about the interconnection of men with men in their common struggles for the human, will never command belief in the realm of the superhuman.

  Max Lerner

  Struggle, Men, Religion

  4 Copy quote

• The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.

  Max Lerner

  War, Way, Energy

  7 Copy quote

• A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.

  Max Lerner

  Suicide, Mean, Technology

  4 Copy quote

• The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

  Max Lerner

  Ideas, America, Competition

  8 Copy quote

• I have a simple principle for the conduct of life- never to resist an adequate temptation.

  Max Lerner

  Simple, Temptation, Principles

  Max Lerner (1959). “The Unfinished Country”

  7 Copy quote

• The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

  Max Lerner

  Travel, Moving, Greatness

  Max Lerner (1959). “The Unfinished Country”

  7 Copy quote

• 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 the efforts at military security.

  Max Lerner

  Military, War, Giving

  4 Copy quote

• Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.

  Max Lerner

  Heart, Men, Brain

  4 Copy quote

• If you mean by capitalism the God-given right of a few big corporations to make all the decisions that will affect millions of workers and consumers and to exclude everyone else from discussing and examining those decisions, then the unions are threatening capitalism.

  Max Lerner

  Mean, Decision, Unions

  "Lou Dobbs Tonight", www.cnn.com. November 14, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

• A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician

  Max Lerner

  Dream, Politician, Columnists

  24 Copy quote

• Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.

  Max Lerner

  Rights, Mind, Principles

  10 Copy quote

• Some of the more fatuous flag-waving Americans are in danger of forgetting that you can't extract gratitude as you would extract a tooth; that unless friendship is freely given, it means nothing and less than nothing.

  Max Lerner

  Gratitude, Mean, Teeth

  4 Copy quote

• Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.

  Max Lerner

  Knowledge, Men, Skills

  4 Copy quote

• The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

  Max Lerner

  Astonishment, Kingdoms, Surprise

  9 Copy quote

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