Daniel Patrick Moynihan quotes

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

#Marriage #Children #Men

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Government #Liberty #Encounters

You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Facts #Opinion

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 #America

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Heart #World #Break

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
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Growing Up #Men #Numbers

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Education #Truth #Freedom

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

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

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

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Race #Issues #Benefits

Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Heart #Devil #Littles

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

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.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Country #Men #Jail

The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Country #Ambition #People

No one is innocent after the experience of governing. But not everyone is guilty.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Guilty #Innocent

As the family goes, so go the children.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Marriage #Children

So many of the new nations which were established as democracies after the second world war, during the decolonizing process, have now changed their system to state-socialism. Small elites run them, and they aren't sharing societies. They aren't even socialist. The power of the state has been merged with business property and you have the greatest concentration of power that's possible.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Running #War #Democracy

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

The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Force

Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Liberty #Desire #Libertarian

If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Years #Social #Get Involved

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 #Numbers #Rights

...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.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Sex #Moving #Government

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

What is not discussed, will not be advanced.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Simple #Political #Want

A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Elderly #Civilization #Political

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 #Understanding #Foundation

The Lord looks after drunks and Americans.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Looks #Lord

Things become complicated if there are enough people to complexify them.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#People #Complicated #Enough

We've come full circle but the best remains the heart of the city, the greatest center of the greatest city, our Acropolis, where our Christmas tree is lighted.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Heart #Cities #Circles

The atmosphere in which social legislation is considered is not a friend of truth.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Atmosphere #Politics #Social

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.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Tasks #States #Given

Secrecy is for losers. . . . It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most persuasive of Cold War-era regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#War #Government #Support

It is perhaps common in the world for individuals and nations to suffer for their noble qualities more than for their ignoble ones. For nobility is an occasion for pride, the most treacherous of sentiments.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#Pride #Suffering #Quality