Top 84 Moynihan Quotes
#1. The people I admire most are those doing outstanding things for the poorest children, such as Michael Wilshaw at Mossbourne academy, Dan Moynihan and all those at the Harris academies, and those at chains such as Ark and the Haberdashers, who are driving up standards in the poorest areas.
Michael Gove
#2. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the archetypal extremely smart person who went into politics anyway instead of doing something worthwhile for his country.
P. J. O'Rourke
#3. Pat Moynihan could write books with one hand and legislate with the other. I can't; I have a short attention span. The slightest distraction would take me away from writing.
Barney Frank
#4. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
Chris Rodda
#5. Bad liars always think they're good at it. (quoting Michael Moynihan)
Jon Ronson
#6. Me, Billy Crystal and John Goodman hang out non-stop, and all we do is silly voices. We hang out in a little closet and do voices together.
Bobby Moynihan
#8. 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
#9. Citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce nonpublic individuals to act in a way the officials desire.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#10. I'm very wary with impressions - I don't think I'm very good at impressions, I hate doing them.
Bobby Moynihan
#11. 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
#14. Irresponsibility breeds irresponsibility. The finances of government are so central. You'd think that would be pretty obvious.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#16. I was a bartender at a Pizzeria Uno's for nine years. The people I worked with were amazing, but it was quite possibly the most miserable time of my life.
Bobby Moynihan
#17. Secrecy is for losers. For people who do not know how important the information really is.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#18. 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
#19. When I was at Upright Citizens Brigade, I would pretend to be a sad, drunk rapper.
Bobby Moynihan
#20. 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
#23. I grew up listening to a lot of Snoop Dogg and the Wu-Tang Clan. Actually, I was a huge Wu-Tang fan.
Bobby Moynihan
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#29. 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
#30. I did a lot of theater as a kid because I had a bunch of friends who did it.
Bobby Moynihan
#31. This is a marathon in life. You can't be sprinting all the time or else you wear yourself out. You have to make sure you're taking care of yourself, keeping yourself grounded and not letting every little thing get you worked up.
Brian Moynihan
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. My first 'SNL' episode was with Michael Phelps and Lil Wayne. And if you go back and watch the monologue - it was supposed to feature Barack Obama, but we couldn't get him - it was with William Shatner. But if you watch it, Guy Fieri is sitting in the front row.
Bobby Moynihan
#36. The world's largest debtor is a distinction of sorts, but not the one we like having ...
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#37. If you watched 'Lost,' sometimes the episodes were crazy good, and sometimes you're like, 'That one was just sorta there.'
Bobby Moynihan
#40. I'm not very big on politics. I'm a comedian and not that smart. I don't have the mind capacity for it.
Bobby Moynihan
#41. One does not part willingly with early
loyalties or early traditions, and indeed the rolling years do but confirm them.
Michael Moynihan
#42. 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
#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
#46. In my mind, not in real life. My rap name will be Optimus Rhymes. Or the Notorious B.o.B.
Bobby Moynihan
#47. I've worked with Method Man and Shaquille O'Neil on multiple occasions. I'd never have thought. It's like, 'Oh, those guys. They're my movie buddies.'
Bobby Moynihan
#48. My dad is quite possibly the biggest Giants fan in the world. I believe he wore a Phil Simms jersey to my high school and college graduations.
Bobby Moynihan
#49. I think I'm a big kid at heart, so I get very excited around the holidays.
Bobby Moynihan
#50. The challenge to people like me is, how do you use your capabilities and resources to help support things that are important to you, whether it's the arts or education or homelessness?
Brian Moynihan
#52. There's a guy on YouTube named Mac Lethal - he spits hot fire.
Bobby Moynihan
#53. I don't have a dark side as far as there is, like, murder in my past, but yeah, I think I'm a pretty nice, easygoing guy.
Bobby Moynihan
#56. 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
#57. Stubborn opposition to proposals often has no other basis than the complaining question, 'Why wasn't I consulted?'
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#58. My mom makes something called green pie, which I thought was a delicacy that many people only had at Thanksgiving, but it turns out it was just Jell-O with whipped cream on it. And it's delicious.
Bobby Moynihan
#61. I steal props from 'SNL' a great deal. Almost every sketch I'm in, I try to grab something from it, so I have a storage space full of props.
Bobby Moynihan
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. It's not like you do 'SNL' and then get handed movie roles. You work, you audition for stuff and try to get it. I think, a lot of people, it's the goal to be in movies or just to be working in general. But yeah, some of us get lucky and get some movie roles, and it's nice.
Bobby Moynihan
#68. 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
#69. I never really read comics. I bought them, and I would draw them.
Bobby Moynihan
#70. I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#72. At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#73. 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
#74. If we get into the mind-set where the good becomes the enemy of the best, we will get nothing.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#75. 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
#77. 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
#78. The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#79. 'SNL' is one of those jobs where you are constantly reminded of how lucky you are and that you get to meet some of these people whose work you enjoy. Then you get to meet them, and they are just wonderful people. It turns out wonderfully, and you have a great conversation.
Bobby Moynihan
#80. I'm very bad with music. I don't know any new music. I've listened to the same 10 or 12 albums my whole life.
Bobby Moynihan
#81. People who pierce the veil of money rarely return with their faculties altogether intact.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#82. 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
#83. Pandaemonium was inhabited by creatures quite convinved that the great Satan had their best interests at heart. Poor little devils.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#84. These days with the web, you can burn out a character really quick.
Bobby Moynihan
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