Murray Kempton Quotes

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

Murray Kempton

#2. It turns out that we're not the only ones who go out on a scientific limb as we discuss or attempt to discuss cars, car repairs and scientific education in America today.

Tom Magliozzi

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

Murray Kempton

#4. 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

#5. I'll always hate shoes.

Benjamin Alire Saenz

#6. 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

#7. A model is a selectively simplified and consciously structured form of knowledge.

Eric Evans

#8. I'm glad he's hungry. Not that I want him to suffer, poor chap! But then he'll enjoy eating me much more. There's a cheerful side to everything.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Murray Kempton

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

Murray Kempton

#11. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#12. Sometimes I wish I could just go back to Florida and, like, date my home-town boyfriend. It's really frustrating whenever I can't go and do something because I know it's going to be on the internet.

Ashley Greene

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

Murray Kempton

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

Murray Kempton

#17. 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

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

Murray Kempton

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

Murray Kempton

#20. 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

#21. And how's that? You a manager at McDonalds?

Molly McAdams

#22. 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

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

Murray Kempton

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

Murray Kempton

#25. 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

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

Murray Kempton

#27. My first few weeks as a vampire had been inordinately busy. Like The Young and the Restless, but with slightly dead people.

Chloe Neill

#28. 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

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

Murray Kempton

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

Murray Kempton

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

Murray Kempton

#32. Mathematicians do not deal in objects, but in relations between objects; thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so lone as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant; they are interested in form only.

Henri Poincare