Lerner's Quotes

#1. Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing here but it sounds better in French.

Alan Jay Lerner

#2. The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.

Max Lerner

#3. venting anger does not solve the problem that anger signals.

Harriet Lerner

#4. You know teenage boys, you own one-Mason Lerner

Natasha Larry

#5. Women's history is the
primary tool for women's emancipation.

Gerda Lerner

#6. People say things die in winter, but it isn't true, mostly. They just gather their strength.

Rose Lerner

#7. [I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

Betsy Lerner

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

Max Lerner

#9. There is unspeakable yet entirely preventable suffering in this world. The job of journalists and writers engaged with global issues is to articulate the unspeakable and give voice to solutions.
K. Lee Lerner

K. Lee Lerner

#10. They would ask people to do
something that is wrong? I thought angels were ... " She stumbled, trying to
think of a word to describe her preconceived notion. "Angelic," Jaycie Lerner

Natasha Larry

#11. Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.

Harriet Lerner

#12. Anything that can unambiguously represent two values - while resisting, just a wee bit, randomly flipping from the state you want retained into the opposite state - can encode binary data.

Edward M. Lerner

#13. The secret to the city is integration. Every area of the city should combine work, leisure and culture. Separate these functions and parts of the city die.

Jaime Lerner

#14. I understood Truman Capote's brilliant assessment of the writer's dilemma: When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip.

Betsy Lerner

#15. Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

Max Lerner

#16. Asking for advice about what you should write is a little like asking for help getting dressed. I can you tell you what I think looks good, but you have to wear it. And as every fashion victim knows, very few people look good in everything.

Betsy Lerner

#17. Don't use "below-the-belt" tactics. These include: blam- ing, interpreting, diagnosing, labeling, analyzing, preaching, moralizing, ordering, warning, interrogating, ridiculing, and lecturing. Don't put the other person down.

Harriet Lerner

#18. 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

#19. Maybe I liked his sculpture more when I couldn't get close to it, had to see it from a fixed position through a pane of glass, so that I had to project myself into the encounter with its three-dimensionality.

Ben Lerner

#20. In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

Max Lerner

#21. Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours.

Ben Lerner

#22. I want to believe humanity has not forgotten how to explore.

Edward M. Lerner

#23. 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

#24. The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

Max Lerner

#25. What is dangerous about tranquillizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is a packaged peace of mind. Where you buy a pill and buy peace of mind with it, you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones.

Max Lerner

#26. Because religious institutions are not afraid to talk about love as a goal, they are likely to be more effective at providing community services.

Michael Lerner

#27. Energy always flows either toward hope, community, love, generosity, mutual recognition, and spiritual aliveness or it flows toward despair, cynicism, fear that there is not enough, paranoia about the intentions of others, and a desire to control.

Michael Lerner

#28. The more we seek exclusivity in friendship, the more it becomes obligatory and the less likely it is to fulfill the wonderful vision of what true friendship can be.

Harriet Lerner

#29. Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

Ben Lerner

#30. Americans live in a twilight world between a sense of loss and a sense of resigned acceptance.

Max Lerner

#31. Nothing you say can ensure that the other person will get it, or respond the way you want. You may never exceed his threshold of deafness.

Harriet Lerner

#32. If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

Ben Lerner

#33. I always try to say, 'If you want to help the environment, try to do just two things. One, use less of your car. Second, separate your garbage.'

Jaime Lerner

#34. When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

Max Lerner

#35. The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.

Harriet Lerner

#36. I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.

Ben Lerner

#37. Although it's not useful to drown in despair, it's also not useful to keep a 'positive attitude' when this means concealing or denying real emotions.

Harriet Lerner

#38. Historically, if you look at people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, people with disposable incomes have always been agricultural innovators.

Sandra Lerner

#39. What SF author or fan isn't interested in human space travel? I've yet to meet one.

Edward M. Lerner

#40. There is a hate layer of opinion and emotion in America. There will be other McCarthys to come who will be hailed as its heroes.

Max Lerner

#41. Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.

Max Lerner

#42. I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.

Ben Lerner

#43. Authors like reading. Go figure. So it's not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.

Edward M. Lerner

#44. We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

Max Lerner

#45. Social media is an information channel; it's like radio or TV ... In Cisco, we made a lot of money on public protocol. I think the social media model replicates that protocol.

Sandra Lerner

#46. 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

#47. The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Max Lerner

#48. I'm getting married in the morning! / Ding dong! the bells are gonna chime. / Pull out the stopper! Let's have a whopper! / But get me to the church on time!.

Alan Jay Lerner

#49. It's the worst sort of snobbery to condemn a book without reading it, merely because it's popular.

Rose Lerner

#50. There's a smile on my face for the whole human race.

Alan Jay Lerner

#51. Secrets are my profession. I know them inside and out. What separates me from someone I'm lying to isn't the lie. It's that I know I'm lying. It's a pane of glass---they can't see it, but I don't forget it's there.

Rose Lerner

#52. Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways - there's no division between the art object and what surrounds it.

Ben Lerner

#53. Love wasn't selfless, and it wasn't selfish either. Love was equality. It was saying that another person's self was just as important as yours, and expecting them to feel the same way.

Rose Lerner

#54. The commitment of marriage can frequently arouse some rather peculiar behaviour in men and women alike, but the bizarre notion that one can change the character of one's mate seems to occur more often to women than to men.

Alan Jay Lerner

#55. We commonly confuse closeness with sameness and view intimacy as the merging of two separate I's into one worldview.

Harriet Lerner

#56. Wherever you find a wife and mother-in-law slugging it out, you'll find a son who's not speaking up to either his mother or his wife.

Harriet Lerner

#57. In Lerner's experiments, the desperate need to make sense of events can lead people to inaccurate conclusions (for example, a woman "led on" a rapist);

Jonathan Haidt

#58. The medical nanobots in my novel 'Small Miracles' tap the energy sources that the patient's own body provides. That is, they can metabolize glycerol and glucose, just as the cells in our bodies do.

Edward M. Lerner

#59. It's just a game," she says. Make no mistake: people who say it's just a game are out for blood.

Betsy Lerner

#60. Fear of failure is the reason most often cited to explain why so many aspiring writers never realize their dreams. But I think it's that same fear of failure that absolutely invigorates those who do push through-that is, the fear of not being heard.

Betsy Lerner

#61. I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

Ben Lerner

#62. A people's speech is the skin of its culture.

Max Lerner

#63. Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

Ben Lerner

#64. Readers and viewers will differ about what's totally standalone, what's totally serially dependent, and what's merely enriched by reading/viewing in a particular order.

Edward M. Lerner

#65. When anxiety disrupts functioning, it's psychiatric illness.

Harriet Lerner

#66. People marry with a deep longing that their partner will tend to their wounds, not throw salt in them. Honor your partner's vulnerability.

Harriet Lerner

#67. There's a widespread belief that if you have solid self-esteem you don't need outside affirmation and praise. This is patently untrue, by the way.

Harriet Lerner

#68. My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that's all I'd ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.

Ben Lerner

#69. But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

Betsy Lerner

#70. Get this under control as soon as you can young lady, because no one here gives a damn about your unlimited power-Mason Lerner

Natasha Larry

#71. Then he imagined his narrator standing before it, imagined that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author and the narrator, while they couldn't face each other, could intuit each other's presence by facing the same light, a kind of correspondence.

Ben Lerner

#72. For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can't paint in Paris, you'd better give up and marry the boss's daughter.

Alan Jay Lerner

#73. If I do decide to have a Girl's Gone Wild moment, I want it to be with some hot young thing, not a senior citizen-Jaycie Lerner

Natasha Larry

#74. When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare.

Ben Lerner

#75. It would help if human experts agreed on the meaning of such basic terms as intelligence, consciousness, or awareness. They don't. It's hard to build something that's incompletely defined.

Edward M. Lerner

#76. I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn't imply people aren't multi-dimensional.

Ben Lerner

#77. When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.

Gerda Lerner

#78. Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

Ben Lerner

#79. It's remarkable how many couples can precisely describe their particular pattern of painful fighting, and claim to be helpless to change it.

Harriet Lerner

#80. Winning supporters over can only really be achieved by what you do, not what you say. It's no use just smiling and shaking hands and getting quoted with witty one-liners.

Randy Lerner

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

Max Lerner

#82. We had a small farm growing up. It was my grandfather's farm, and we didn't torture the animals, and we didn't feed them stuff we wouldn't eat.

Sandra Lerner

#83. I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

Ben Lerner

#84. Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Ben Lerner

#85. An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him.

Alan Jay Lerner

#86. Collaboration is a nice change of pace from the often solitary nature of the writer's craft.

Edward M. Lerner

#87. I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

Ben Lerner

#88. To the distinguished female author's left was her husband, probably also distinguished in some way, who had the look of many husbands: eyebrows perpetually raised a little in a defensive mask of polite interest, signifying boredom.

Ben Lerner

#89. The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because it's the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained.

Gerda Lerner

#90. Women's history is women's right-an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision.

Gerda Lerner

#91. A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.

Jaime Lerner

#92. The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.

Harriet Lerner

#93. We have to invest in developing Villa Park, allowing us to generate our own revenue streams. At the same time, of course, there's a balance between growing long-term and getting the instant results we all crave as fans.

Randy Lerner

#94. I've never really seen other people spend other people's money wisely.

Sandra Lerner

#95. I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.

Ben Lerner

#96. In U.S. sports, you tend to be pretty strictly limited by the size of your team's market. When we heard that Villa was a club here that might be available, I had a strong feeling that a team in the West Midlands could be the chance to create something very special.

Randy Lerner

#97. I always run into these Ph.D.s. They write and write and write about sustainable development. Then these guys ask me, 'But, how do you do it?' They are scared to death to do anything.

Jaime Lerner

#98. the laboratories established by German pharmaceutical and dye manufacturers in the 1880s and 1890s as the first truly institutionalized research laboratories, and to General Electric's 1900 laboratory as the pioneer in America.17

Josh Lerner

#99. Before modern feminism, stories of female ambition were silenced or erased; even now, they are told with apology ("Yes, it's a great honor to be a Nobel Prize laureate, but really, what I love best is staying home and being a mother to Kevin and Annie").

Harriet Lerner

#100. One doesn't just wander unvetted into someone else's epic interstellar future history.

Edward M. Lerner