Murray Kempton quotes
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“A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.”
-- Murray Kempton -
“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 in which each was tested and to some degree found wanting. [...] The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival.”
-- Murray Kempton -
“America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.”
-- Murray Kempton -
“The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.33, New York Review of Books
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“To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (1972). “America comes of middle age: columns, 1950-1962”
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“It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.46, New York Review of Books
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“There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (1972). “America comes of middle age: columns, 1950-1962”
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“A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.92, New York Review of Books
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“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.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.283, New York Review of Books
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“The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.16, New York Review of Books
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“There is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his children spends his life building inside himself a cage to pen that tiger in.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (1972). “America comes of middle age: columns, 1950-1962”
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“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 name of defending us against subversion.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (1972). “America comes of middle age: columns, 1950-1962”
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“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 he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.246, New York Review of Books
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“The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (1972). “America comes of middle age: columns, 1950-1962”
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“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 upon reality as being in company is attendant upon the flight from reality.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.318, New York Review of Books
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“It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.”
-- Murray Kempton -
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“A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.”
-- Murray Kempton -
“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 and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.14, New York Review of Books
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“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 idea at all.”
-- Murray Kempton -
“A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (1972). “America comes of middle age: columns, 1950-1962”
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“No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.”
-- Murray Kempton -
“The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : "Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties".
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“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 has been unimportant in the sum of things.”
-- Murray KemptonSource : Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.169, New York Review of Books
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