Murray Kempton Quotes

#1. 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 Kempton

#2. A neighborhood is where, when you go out of it, you get beat up.

Murray Kempton

#3. A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

Murray Kempton

#4. Men very seldom change, try though we will, beneath the shifts of exterior doctrine, our hearts so often remain what they were.

Murray Kempton

#5. To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

Murray Kempton

#6. We are a government of laws. Any laws some government hack can find to louse up a man who's down.

Murray Kempton

#7. 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 Kempton

#8. It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

Murray Kempton

#9. The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.

Murray Kempton

#10. When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.

Murray Kempton

#11. 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 Kempton

#12. A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

Murray Kempton

#13. There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.

Murray Kempton

#14. America ... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

Murray Kempton

#15. No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

Murray Kempton

#16. A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.

Murray Kempton

#17. 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 Kempton

#18. The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by men incapable of it.

Murray Kempton

#19. The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

Murray Kempton

#20. It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

Murray Kempton

#21. 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 Kempton

#22. 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 Kempton

#23. To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.

Murray Kempton