Top 54 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes
#1. Government cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those energies.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#2. 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
#3. 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
#6. Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no other basis than the complaining question, 'Why wasn't I consulted?'
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#7. The nature of the new world system was not so different from the old. It was for the moment more stable, but a reasonable forecast would be that Africa in particular had a century of border wars ahead of it.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#12. Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#13. 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
#14. People who pierce the veil of money rarely return with their faculties altogether intact.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#15. The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#16. 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
#18. In the era of security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#19. If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#20. 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
#21. At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#23. I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#35. Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You'd think that would be pretty obvious.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#38. 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
#39. Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#40. The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#41. The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having ...
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#43. 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
#44. At 14 you are still in most respects a dependent youth, in some respects a child. At 24 you are an adult. In between, extraordinary turbulences take place.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#54. What the press never does say is who the leaker is and why he wants the story leaked. Yet, more often than not, this is the more important story: What policy wins if the one being disclosed loses?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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