Quotes by Daniel Patrick Moynihan - Page 2 | QuoteForever

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In 1914, there were two countries in the world that required you to have a passport if you wanted to enter - Czarist Russia and the Ottomans. Anywhere else, you could come and go as you pleased.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Russia
Anywhere Else
Come And Go
Enter
Passport
Pleased
Required
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In my view - which could be wrong, but it is my field - there is no better formula for social instability than to divide a society between two ascribed characteristics that are seen as opposite.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Characteristics
Instability
Opposite
Seen
Divide
Field
Formula
View
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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 / Former United States Senator
Doe
Important
Winning
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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 / Former United States Senator
Change
Society
Truth
Conservative
Culture
Truth Is
Success Change Politics
Central
Itself
Determines
Liberal
Save
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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 / Former United States Senator
Government
Energy
Inner Peace
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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 / Former United States Senator
Quality
Pride
Suffering
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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 / Former United States Senator
War
Borders
Different
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The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow. If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Equality
Generations
Principal
Revolution
Phase
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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 / Former United States Senator
Civilization
Elderly
Political
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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 / Former United States Senator
Government
War
Support
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I did not have a lot of spare time after I was about eleven because in my youth, young people used to try to find ways of making money after school. From about age eleven on, I either shined shoes or did something such.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Eleven
Making Money
Spare Time
Time Age Money
Spare
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The Democrats have prevailed because, at heart, we have embodied a great idea, which is that an elected government can be the instrument of the common purpose of a free people; that government can embrace great causes and do great things.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Causes
Great Idea
Great Things
Democrats
Elected
Embodied
Free People
Instrument
Prevailed
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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 / Former United States Senator
Country
Numbers
Rights
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I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Brilliant
Labor
Mathematical
Modern Technology
Tracking
Bureau
Charge
Statistical
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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 / Former United States Senator
Given
States
Tasks
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If we haven't become the Liberty Party of an undoubted future, let us take this fact: the great totalitarian regimes have died. The Soviet Union broke up along ethnic lines, as we always thought it would. The Chinese - am I wrong? - are becoming a commercial civilization.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Becoming
Broke
Chinese
Civilization
Died
Liberty
Lines
Party
Regimes
Soviet
Soviet Union
Future Great Always
Commercial
Ethnic
Let Us
Union
Totalitarian
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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 / Former United States Senator
Hopeful
Perfect
Thinking
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It's always been a subtext of our secular optimism that you solve the economic problem, and all other things sort of take care of themselves. Well, we seem to be doing well on the economic side - we are doing very well - and the other things are not solving - they're compounding.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Secular
Subtext
Take Care
Compounding
Solving
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We must not let ourselves be seen as rushing around the world looking for arguments... Nor should we let ourselves be seen as ignoring allies, disillusioning friends, thinking only of ourselves in the most narrow terms. That is not how we survived the 20th century. Nor will it serve in the 21st.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Allies
Rushing
Survived
Ignoring
Narrow
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Liberty lives in protest and democracy prospers under conditions of change. When we travel about the world and come to a country whose newspapers are filled with bad news we feel that liberty lives in that land. When we come to a country whose newspapers are filled with good news, we feel differently.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Country
Democracy
Land
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The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Men
Capacity To Love
Understanding
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...there is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Government
Moving
Sex
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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 - that community asks for and gets chaos.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Relationship
Women
Future
Growing Up
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I have no doubt that there will continue to be bumps, some serious crises indeed in our relationship with China.... Neither membership in the WTO nor normalized trade relations with the United States will magically impose the rule of law on China or institute deep-seeded respect for human rights. But it certainly has potential to advance those purposes.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Doubt
Law
Rights
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Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Political
Simple
Want
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So many of the new nations which were established as democracies after the second world war, during the decolonizing process, have now changed their system to state-socialism. Small elites run them, and they aren't sharing societies. They aren't even socialist. The power of the state has been merged with business property and you have the greatest concentration of power that's possible.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Running
War
Democracy
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One ideological claim is that private property is theft, that the natural product of the existence of property is evil, and that private ownership therefore should not exist... What those who feel this way don't realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control - that property is a system for the disposal of power. The absence of property almost always means the concentration of power in the state.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Politics
Evil
Mean
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The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Breakup
Russia
Ukraine
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The work of democratic government is routinely concerned with matters defined as troubles. In "The Presidency and the Press" I make the point, familiar to anyone who has flown about the world much, that the best quick test of the political nature of a regime is to read the local papers on arrival. If they are filled with bad news, you have landed in a libertarian society of some sort. If, on the other hand, the press is filled with good news, it is a fair bet that the jails will be filled with good men.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Former United States Senator
Men
Hands
Jail
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